When we last left off, we were ending the Year of Fun a bit earlier than expected and decided to give the whole baby making thing another try. We were able to schedule an appointment with Dr. S fairly quickly and get the ball rolling agian.
We met with Dr. S in November 2011 to discuss what our next steps were. He said the surgery had great odds of being successful. It was still going to have to be covered out of pocket, but we could fight it with insurance and he'd be behind us 100%. Once we figured out our payment options and how we were going to make this thing work,we got the surgery scheduled for early February 2012. We also decided to go ahead and do a tissue harvest this time just in case it wasn't able to be repaired. If that were the case, we'd have testicular tissue to be able to do IVF with ICSI.
The surgery was a success! Dr. S was able to totally repair the right side. The left side was too far gone to be able to fix, but we just needed one side. He was very excited with the results and we left the surgical center (it was a same day procedure) in good spirits. B spent the weekend icing his manly bits and resting up.
The plan was to have a SA (semen analysis) 2 months post op to see how things were progressing. Dr. S warned us that it could take up to a year to see any sperm in an SA following this type of procedure. His first post op SA was in April 2012. It was great. The numbers were still lower than normal, but there were definitely sperm in there! In fact, there were enough for me to be able to go back to Dr. M and get my process started again! (I'll post that in part 5 since my stuff is fairly involved.) Since the numbers were less than "normal", Dr. S wanted a follow up SA in 2 more months. So, in June, off we went again. This time was not good. It was bad. There were like maybe 2 sperm in the SA. And, those were dead. They were not forward moving at all. We were crushed. Devestated. Had the surgery not worked after all? Had B scarred back up again? We didn't know what to do, but we knew we couldn't afford to pay for another uncovered surgery. We went to see Dr. S and he was just as upset as us. He said it could be a fluke, it could be an infection, it could be scarring. There's really no way to know. His first line of defense was to do a "drug cocktail" as he put it. It was an anti inflammatory, an antibiotic, and a steroid. B was to take it for 10 days. I made sure he took that stuff like it was his job. It appeared to work. His follow up SA was amazing! His numbers were through the roof fantastic. I cried when I saw the results. It was just so amazing!
He's had to continue to do follow up visits just to make sure nothing else goes wrong. So far, so good.
Next up - my treatments.
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