The Process

Many of you know that Bryce and I have been married for over eight years and trying to get pregnant for seven of those years. We tried many infertility treatments, such as chlomid and artificial insemenation four times. We did all the testing and blood work and everything seemed normal. Well, we decided to quit all that stuff in Summer of 2004. We turned in our adoption papers in November and our family was blessed with Cooper in April. Cooper has been the greatest thing that has ever happened to us. Looking back, we would go through all that again to get our special little boy to our family. It's funny how Heavenly Father's plan is different for each of us. But His plan is perfect and we just have to have faith in Him.

Last July, Bryce and I decided that we would go down the infertility specialist at the University of Utah and start the whole "process"again.

In July, I set up our first appointment with Dr. Hatasaka, whom we had heard many great things about.

On September 10, we had our first appointment. We sat down with the doctor and went over all of our medical history. He looked through our charts from Dr. Fowers and asked us lots of questions. This took a little over an hour. He decided that since it had been 4 years since we had done any testing, that we should do it over again. So, for the next five weeks, we did the following tests:

Blood work (jenn) ; they tested my hormones for FSH and also to make sure I wasn’t a carrier of cystic fibrosis; they popped my blood vessel and my entire elbow and half my arm was black and blue for weeks
HSG Exam- (jenn); this takes place at the hospital; they basically are putting dye into my fallopian tubes to make sure there is no blockage; they do this while I am laying under an x-ray machine; very painful procedure
Semen Analysis (bryce); everything came back normal;
Hamster Egg Test (bryce) this test consists of having 10 hamster eggs flown from Chicago to Salt Lake; Bryce’s semen is placed on them to see if they can penetrate the eggs (hamster eggs are the closest eggs to human eggs) ; on average, 2 sperm with penetrate each egg; Bryce had 8 sperm that penetrated each egg

Again, everything came back normal, as we expected. So, it was back to the drawing table for us and the doctor. I will be posting the next 3 days!