A bit of insanity, but also, a little bit of hope

In my previous post, I mentioned that J's SA results weren't exactly all that we had hoped that they would be. That was a disappointment, to say the least. But now we know at least one thing that we're up against, and we can start moving on.

I was actually out of town when we got his results, so after I got home, and after Memorial Day, I faxed his results to my doctor's office and included a note asking her to call me. At the time, the plan was that his doctor's office was going to refer him to an urologist, and I wanted to make sure that there wasn't anything else that my doctor wanted to do while we ruled things out on his end. But my doctor didn't call me back last Tuesday, and she was in a different office on Wednesday, so I expected her to call back on Thursday. Which she didn't. And she didn't call me back on Friday, either (although that wound up working a bit in my favor because it allowed me some time to research and clarify a couple of things before talking to her, as I'll discuss below).

We did, however, hear back from J's doctor's office on Wednesday. They said that the insurance company denied the referral to the urologist but instead wanted him to be referred to WIN Fertility, which we thought was a doctor's office until J called to make an appointment and was told that he needed to pick a doctor from the list that they would send him and set up an appointment with that doctor. At that point we got really confused about what was going on, so I Googled WIN Fertility, and apparently it is some sort of middleman organization that manages fertility treatments for BCBS HMO Illinois, or some such nonsense.

Anyway, we got the list of doctors from WIN Fertility, and I started looking at the SART website to see the stats for several of the doctors and clinics in the area. I actually had a recommendation of one particular doctor from a friend, so I tried looking at his stats, but the SART website said that he reports directly to the CDC so I wound up going there to do most of my research. I looked at results for the past five years, and the doctor that was recommended has the highest success rate in the area (even higher than a place that does roughly 1000 cycles a year).

(As an aside, I have to say once again that I'm really lucky to live in Illinois, which mandates ART coverage. Not only does will it make it possible for us to do whatever it is that we need to do to have a child of our own, but it also means that I have lots of doctors and clinics to choose from.)

Anyway, we decided to go with the doctor that had been recommended to me. J called there on Thursday, but didn't know what to tell them about why he was being referred to that clinic. Because of J's confusion, and because I was still all kinds of confused about what, exactly, WIN Fertility does, I wound up calling WIN Fertility today to find out what was going on. And I think that the guy was trying to be helpful, but he wasn't, really. The gist of what I got from him was that if the fertility specialist wants to send J to a urologist, that's fine, but the fertility specialist has to make that referral, not J's regular doctor, which makes no sense to me. I also asked if his referral to the fertility specialist was tantamount to both of us being referred, as it would be if I was referred, and the answer was more or less no, which was fine.

I was really confused after this conversation, but I talked to J and decided to see if I could work around all of the confusion and have my doctor refer me to the same fertility specialist. She finally called me back this afternoon and we chatted. I told her about how J is being sent to the fertility specialist instead of a urologist, which she agreed made no sense. After talking to her, she was kind enough to agree to refer me to the specialist since we're already going to be wasting time waiting for him to see the specialist and then waiting again for a referral to a urologist and then waiting yet again for him to actually see the urologist, not to mention waiting for whatever treatment the urologist may propose, and since we've hit the one year mark for trying. I asked her if she had any specialists that she prefers to work with, and she mentioned a couple that had pretty crappy stats. I told her that I had looked at the list we had gotten and checked stats and that someone had recommended another doctor to me and that I'd like to see him, instead, if she was ok with that. She warned me that he didn't have the greatest bedside manner, but said that as long as I was ok with that she is, and she'd start working on it. She also told me that if I have any questions to feel free to call her. I think I kinda love my doctor.

Anyway, so to sum up this post, which has become rather rambly and long: J's test results were disappointing, but hopefully soon he'll see the fertility specialist, who will most likely send him to an urologist to get checked out, and hopefully I can get a referral to the same fertility specialist to get a full workup to make sure that everything is ok with me and then we can finally get going.

The end.