It all began early Monday morning (actually Sunday night) since we didn’t get to bed due to the excitement. At 3 AM we caught a limo to the airport in the midst of a particularly nasty winter storm: 30cm of snow, sleet, wind, ice, and freezing rain. This storm literally had it all. This isn’t so unusual (because we live on the East Coast) and the planes run on schedule. By 6 AM, we are sitting on an airplane waiting to fly to Cancún and *hopefully* change our lives forever.
We arrive in Cancún around 12:00 PM, local time, which made for about 5.5 hours in the air. After disembarking and gathering our luggage, we headed to the pick up station to get a shuttle to our rental car. We read online about many ill-informed travellers getting snagged up with (the ridiculously complex) insurance policies when renting a car in Mexico and so we were sure to choose a well recommended local company who was completely upfront about all the costs. After picking up our tiny Chevy Spark, (basically a moped with four wheels and four seats) we headed downtown to our Airbnb. We scored – it is even more beautiful than the photos! We unpacked our luggage for the month and took about an hour to settle in and relax. We made a quick trip to Costco to gather groceries and supplies, and then we were back at the condo to make supper and settle in for the night. We watched some Intervention (our guilty pleasure), and then set the alarm for our first fertility appointment on Tuesday morning. Normally, when we are travelling we are burning multiple candles at both ends, but we’ve decided to cool our jets a bit this time (won’t somebody please think about the children?).
We are staying just 5.2km (3 miles) from the clinic, and it’s a quick 15 minute drive. Upon arrival at the clinic, we checked in with the receptionist and confirmed all of our personal and contact information they have on file. So, this isn’t exactly when the fertility treatments begin. We’re here early because our province refused to do the Anti-Müllerian Hormone serum testing, which shows A*’s remaining egg reserves. After checking in, we met Dr. T in person for the first time. She is the Doc we’ve been in communication with, and who set up all our appointments. She’s also helped us with the process of acquiring donor semen from the sperm bank (more on this in a later post). We quickly ducked into another room where a technician extracted two vials of blood to run the AMH testing. The results for this won’t come in for 5 days (4 days as of this posting).
We met with the nurse, Flor, after the bloodwork was done. She was very kind and took the greatest amount of time thus far to actually sit and speak to us about what we were in for. She gave us her contact info for What’s App so we could communicate with her directly if we had any issues or questions throughout the process. She took a detailed medical history, quite similar to one we had filled out online before arriving, but her thoroughness and direct approach was much appreciated. She asked when A* was to start her next period (in two days), and told us that we would come back then to start stimulating medications (stims). No appointment was necessary and the nursing staff would do the first injections to start, then send us home with everything we needed to continue the injections ourselves.
Our chat with Nurse Flor culminated with the main “fertility event” of the day, a trans-vaginal ultrasound. This was performed by Dr. G, who is our doctor now that we are onsite in Cancún. A* was instructed to go into the bathroom to have a pee, remove her shorts and undies, and change into a provided hospital gown. Dr. G was just checking for any ovarian cysts or uterine abnormalities at this stage. There are no follicles to monitor for this cycle as of yet. Dr. G said there were no visible cysts, and that the uterus looked perfectly healthy. I struggled to see what he was seeing, just nodding along and smiling, since the entire screen looked like an out-of-service TV station. A* dressed again and we went to the finance office to settle up for the AMH test. There is an additional fee (we’ll make a post at the end of the process detailing exactly what we spent, and on what) above what we had already paid, because it is generally already done before travelling.
We passed the rest of the afternoon at a public beach in the Hotel Zone of Cancún. We packed a picnic of Caesar salad, ham, cheese and Prosecco which we greatly enjoyed sipping and snacking on whilst looking out over the beautiful turquoise waves and oiled up sun seekers. We had a quick swim and a siesta in the hot, white sand. We awoke to cherry red sunburns and ready to head back to our condo. We had no sooner turned on our nightly Intervention “fix” (seewhatIdidthere) when the power went out in the building. We instead had a lovely candlelit evening: listening to the sounds of the city and watching the world go by from our balcony. Turns out, it was just what the doctor ordered. We had no sooner planned out our next few days before bed when I heard A* cursing in the bathroom. I walked in, and she showed me a small patch of blood on the toilet paper. Scratch all those plans. From then on, it was all nerves, excitement and a healthy bit of terror the night before we head back to the fertility clinic for our first stim shots.
Pride & Joy Family 