Today was our appointment with Stanford. It went well! I’m excited (as I’m about to share), but also cautiously optimistic.
I miss our old doctor. I don’t think that will change, but I think we got REALLY lucky with her. The bond with had with her is one you rarely come across in a Dr-Patient relationship.
However, our new doctor is nice and we like her. She’s straight forward, not afraid to quote research and seems to be inline with our communication style and treatment preference. She sounded a little nervous when she walked in, but I have a good feeling about her. Everyone speaks highly of her, so I have confidence. By the way, if I haven’t mentioned it already, the new doctor used to work with FPNC (the old clinic). She’s now just practicing at Stanford. I think this is actually a bonus for us, because she has the background of where we come from.
I don’t know what I expected of this meeting to be honest. I guess I though it would be just an intro to rehash our history and roughly talk about our options. Then meet with some other people and then return to go over cycle planning. I thought that getting to a cycle planning stage would take at least a week.
Well, it’s definitely moving a lot quicker than I expected (which trust me, is good). Since all of our records were transfered over, and she knew FPNC’s protocol, we covered some of the basics and jumped straight into planning. We are going to go for an IVF round. Since I’ve been on the pill for almost two weeks now, we can do the sonohysterogram and catheter check at any time and start the Lupron as soon as next week-end. I go in for those tests on Monday, then on Tuesday we meet with them to go over the cycle details and go over financials. The financials are where things fell apart last time, so I’m cautiously optimistic this place will work for us. I still haven’t bought the cow yet. After getting burned once, I’m not so ready to get too excited yet.
So that’s the summary: in effect we’re about a week behind where we would have been with FPNC’s schedule.
In other, serendipitous news, as we were driving down to the appointment (I’m not kidding — we were halfway to Palo Alto) we got a call from the old clinic. It was their Chief Financial Officer who wanted to speak with us about what happened two week ago. For some further clarity from my last post, the woman who told us to move to a different clinic was not the CFO. She was someone that reported to her. She had however called the CFO on her mobile, while she was on the phone with us and then told us to move to a different clinic. This left us with the impression that this was per the CFO recommendation. It wasn’t as it turns out, but the end result was the same: we were encouragd to leave the practice. Anyway, the woman sounded nice and sympathetic. I didn’t speak to her myself, but heard the whole conversation over HIS mobile. In summary, she apologized for what had happened, and offered to work with us and make-up for our experience if we chose to go back to them. So I feel a little bit better about them. We won’t go back to them at this point, as they’re still not covered by our insurance company, but if things don’t work for us on the only round we do get expensed, it’s good to know we have options. I’m also hoping, that they’ll change some of the information they communicate in their information sessions: if our rough experience helps another couple not have to go through the same anguish we did, I’ll feel better.
So that’s it for now. Not too much new info to share, I suppose. There’ll be lots more next week. I promise!