Sorting Out the Details

Despite the fact that I wasn't sure I'd survive til the end of this week, let alone the end of this cycle, I spent quite a bit of time yesterday on the phone with a variety of medical and financial types, getting more information about this whole IVF adventure.

First, I talked to both our credit union and the bank that holds our mortgage, about home equity lines of credit.

I'd talked to the mortgage bank last week, and when I called them back for more information, they told me that they'd already gotten the appraisal on the house, and that it was a bit different from what I'd told them.

I was a little nervous about what that might mean, but it turns out that the house is now appraising at about $60,000 more than what we paid for it!

(They obviously have not been inside and have neither seen nor smelled the carpet.)

So, that means that what we owe on the mortgage is actually less than half the value of the home, which gives us a lot more room to borrow against it.

Both banks are offering us a line of credit that's way more than we hope to need, but we have to compare the details and decide which is better.

The biggest difference is that the credit union is offering a lower interest rate (prime minus 1, vs prime minus .26).

The other difference is that the credit union will give us a seven year draw period (we can borrow against it for that long) and then a ten year payback period, meaning we'd have to pay it all off in seventeen years.

The mortgage bank, on the other hand has a ten year draw period, and twenty year pay-off - for a total of thirty years.

On the one hand, having longer sounds better, but I'm thinking that we've really got no business getting ourselves into another 30-year debt. It's bad enough that we'll be 65 before we pay off our house. We don't need to still be paying on the kid when we're 70!

The monthly payments would be a bit higher through the credit union, but it would be a lot less money in the long-run, so I'm leaning that way.

Also, it would just be simpler to deal with, since we already do online banking there, and could make extra payments (tax refunds, other "found money") at any time, with just a click of a mouse.

In medical news, I talked to my nurse to confirm my protocol for the mock EEP cycle, and to our prescreener, who will be directing Shrike to all the hoops that she has to jump through.

I'll continue the estrogen shots, every three days, and will go in on Wednesday December 26 for an ultrasound to check my uterine lining and blood work to check, I don't know, some hormonal crap, I guess.

After that, I'll keep taking the estrogen and will add the daily progesterone shots, until Monday January 7, when I'll have the endometrial biopsy.

That's scheduled for 9:30 am, and then at 11:30 am, we've got a "donor consult" for Shrike with Dr E, and I believe she'll also have some blood work done that day. She's already done all the day three stuff, so we don't have to worry about that.

The only other specific thing the prescreener mentioned was a social worker visit, but we're assuming that another letter from Dr T will suffice for that. We saw her today, and she's going to send that to them in the next few days.

(And I'm sure that the tin of cookies we took her had nothing to do with her agreeing to vouch for our sanity.)

But, I suspect that Dr E will tell us about some other testing that we don't know about yet.

After the biopsy, I'll stop the shots and wait for my period. Then we both go on birth control pills, to get our cycles synced up the way they want, before starting the real IVF cycle.

I also got a bit more information about what Shrike's protocol will be like for the IVF cycle. She'll be taking two or three subcutaneous (belly) shots daily for 10 - 13 days, and will be monitoring (dildo-cam) every two days.

That's much better than the nine daily shots that her cousin says she took when she was stimming!

(On the other hand, Cousin didn't have thirty-six antral follicles - and she was mightily impressed when she heard about Shrike's!)

I feel much more knowledgeable about it all than I did a few days ago, which makes me feel much more comfortable about it all.

I'm sure I bug the crap out of the nurses and everyone else with all my damn questions, but I just need to know as much as I can about what's happening, and why.

There is so much of this that's totally unknowable and totally out of my control, that anything that I can know and / or can control, I just have to.

(Actually, that's just kind of how I am about everything. I'm all about the knowing and controlling.)

Also, while Shrike is generally more the doer around here, and I'm more the sitter-on-my-ass about most things, when it comes to big, complicated projects like - oh, getting married, buying a house, making a baby, that sort of thing - I am the Keeper of the Checklist and the Cracker of the Whip.

As I'm sure is painfully obvious from this blog, I deal with big scary things by obsessing over every fucking detail, whereas Shrike tends to deal with them by ignoring them and hoping they'll go away, so if I'm not on top of what needs to be done and when and where and how, it won't get done.

Therefore, I have to bug the hell out of my nurses and financial people to make sure that I know everything I'm supposed to know, so that nothing gets missed.

Right? Right!

So, what's next?

By the end of the week, we need to make a decision about which bank we're borrowing the money from, and start that ball rolling, so we can be ready to give the clinic a shitload of money on January 7.

Other than that we'll just keep shooting me up, enjoy our Christmas, and wait to learn more.