Past and Present; or, How to Handle a MTHFR

Thanks to everyone who commented or e-mailed me with your advice on last Friday's post. Your suggestions were invaluable and have helped clarify some things for me. I'm so grateful to have a community of women who have been in this position to turn to when things become challenging.

Lawyer Guy is going to find out the max allowance for the FSA today, which should help clarify matters. He's also going to confirm that fertility treatments are permissible expenses (I'm sure they are, but we want to be extra-sure). Additionally, a friend of mine from my message-board support group (who is currently pregnant) offered to mail me several unused gonal-f pens of hers, enough it seems to get me through one round of injectibles+IUI. Given all this, we're leaning really heavily to putting $5000 or so in the FSA (or whatever the max is) and trying to do at least one, maybe two IUI cycle with injects. If the meds are free for the first it will be quite reasonable to pay for both, and I agree with all my bloggies who said it's a good way to test out my response to the stims before the high pressure of an IVF cyle commences.

Obviously, this is all contingent on the outcomes of the next few cycles and our conversations with Dr. W. But I feel like I have some perspective on the situation and a plan, and that always helps.

Also giving us some clarity (though not as much as we'd hoped): Dr. W's office called with the results of my RPL testing today. I tested positive for hetero MTHFR mutation, but everything else was normal. The nurse said that Dr. W is not concerned about the hetero mutation and doesn't fall in the camp that associates it with higher risk of pregnancy loss. The only snag is that the lab didn't test my homocysteine levels, so I need to have another draw to test that when I go in for monitoring for my January Clomid+IUI cycle.

While I'm a little nervous about the hetero MTHFR, I'm beyond relieved that I have no translocations or abnormalities on my karyotyping (and that LG is also free of them). Hetero MTHFR seems to be very common, and I've seen many women identified with it who have healthy pregnancies, so I'm going to hope that it won't cause any harm and that my homocysteine levels come back normal-- or, if they don't, that there's an easy fix for that.

Other than some reflection on hypotheticals and a smattering of test results, not much is happening reproductively right now. I should be getting back together with Pissy in a few days. I think she'll be happy to see me again, but you never know with her. I'm still buried under a mountain of student essays to grade, and after I finish that comes the preparations for Christmas, and then our New Year's trip to the Bahamas, and then AF right when we get back. And then it's 2011 and a new year and a new cycle, and this time a new year is going to actually signify something new for us, dammit.