SOOOOO RELIEVED!!

I went to my introductory appointment at Shady Grove and the best thing happened: I fell in love.  There are no heart-rending baby pictures in the lobby, this location is small with only two doctors, and everybody laughed at my jokes!  The doctor, whose name I have not yet mastered, treated us with tremendous respect.  He started out the session by saying that he could tell we were veterans, and that he would skip his basic introduction and ask what we would like to know, and why we were there. I told him a quick chronology, then said we'd like to know why Shady Grove's statistics in my age group were so much better than Dominion's.  He said it was all because of their lab.  Since they're such a huge operation, they have invested in an amazing lab with tons of very high tech capability.  That made great sense.  And in the last three years, they have compiled a database from 10,000 patients.  So given a few vital statistics like age, hormone levels, etc., he can predict using regression analysis what my personal chances of success are.  And they are right at 50%.   My husband loved him because he considered our infertility to fall in the "unexplained" category, not the "James is a bad man and husband for having bad sperm" category.  And he said that unlike our first doctor who urged us to do IVF on the basis of my HSG [false] positive result, this doctor says he usually ignores those results in patients like me because they are so apt to be wrong.  When he said that he would call us the night before the transfer and discuss with us how many embryos we wanted to stick in, James made up his mind.  Unlike at Dominion, when they asked us after I was already on the table and drugged with Valium, here it would warrant a right-mind discussion! I made up my mind when the doctor laughed at my jokes and said, "You're very expressive." I wanted to ask whether there was a chance I could start an IVF cycle tomorrow (Day 19), even though we were just meeting now.  I preceeded the question with a disclaimer that I knew it was a longshot, and that I might just be being foolish and desperate.  He said that at that clinic they never had anyone who was foolish and desperate.  No offense, chicas, but I'd put us all in that category.  I liked his sense of humor. And the crowning glory was that we DO qualify for their shared risk program, which is cheaper and includes more than the other clinic.  Though our previous doctor cautioned that Shady Grove was just a money-making operation, we found that they recommended using fewer of the "extras" (like ICSI and assisted hatching), and even if we did, they were cheaper there. In short, Ashley hoped that it would be painfully obvious after this meeting what the right choice was.  And it's so painfully obvious that the pain has finally gone away.  So Ash, I won't be your cycle buddy; we'll tag-team it.  But I feel so so so so so so so much better! Thank you, my friends, for babysitting and consoling me this week.  It's been a long one.