Too close for comfort

What a fucking weekend.

I took all of your wonderful advice and, when I woke up on Friday morning with still no email from the Czech clinic, I wrote them again.  The gist of it was "hey, I haven't heard from you and I'm really worried, what the eff?" but I was of course much more polite in real life.  When I got home from work on Friday afternoon, an email awaited me.  The doctor had been very busy, and they were very apologetic for not getting back to me sooner.

Happily, all went well with the donor's checkup.  Retrieval and transfer are scheduled tentatively around July 2nd to 7th, which fits nicely in our availability window.  Score!

The rest of the email went on to say that the donor's period would be later than mine, so I should take norethisterone to delay my period.  I was instructed to start taking it at least 5 days before my expected period and keep taking it until they told me to stop.

Fine, except for one leeetle problem.  I had no idea what norethisterone was, let alone have any.  I was already on CD21.  Which was still fine, if I was going to have a 28 day cycle this month.  But sadly, my crystal ball is in the shop and therefore I had no way of knowing if I was headed for a 25 day cycle instead.  If I was, I needed this medication STAT.  Oh, and did I mention it was past 5pm on a Friday afternoon?

I made a few desperation calls to my RE and regular GP anyway, but as one would expect they were all closed.  I resolved to get up early, get my ass to a weekend walk-in clinic first thing in the morning, and talk some random doctor into giving me mystery drugs.  Piece of cake, right?

This part of the plan was actually surprisingly easy to execute.  I explained my situation, and the doctor pulled out his prescription pad.  Note to self: next time ask for narcotics too.  However, a red flag went up when he asked me how to spell it so he could go look it up.  My suspicion was confirmed when I left the clinic and walked into the pharmacy down the hall, where I was confronted with a look of confusion by the pharmacist.  My heart sank.  The unexpected snag: no one knew what the fuck this drug was and they sure as hell didn't have it in stock.  They could order it, but it wouldn't arrive before Monday.  CD23.  Tick tock tick tock.

For those of you wondering, norethisterone is a magical drug that is apparently widely used in the UK and Europe to delay your period if you're going on vacation or getting married or have some other event going on that would be marred by the arrival of your boorish Aunt Flo.  Apparently those of us with Canadian uteruses (uteri??) are too damn polite to use this drug to tell AF to go the fuck off back where she came from.  I imagine it sounding something like this:

Canadian uterus:  Hey there Aunt Flo, how ya doin', eh?  Good ta hear from ya.  What's that?  You were thinkin' aboot comin' fer a visit?  Oh yah, sounds great!  Whenaboots?  Oh, next week?  See...yeah...it's just that me 'n' the mister, we were headed to Jamaica donchaknow, had a week's vacation all booked and...oh...ya got the dog sitter booked already?  Yeah...no, I know, they're not easy to come by...but see, we had this holiday planned since December, and we had six months of snow...yeah...yup...uh huh...sure.  See ya Wednesday.

British uterus:  Oy, wot's this now?  You wanted to pop round next week for a spot o' tea?  Hah!  You taking the piss or wot?  Not bloody likely!  Now bugger off, you barmy wanker, or you'll be findin' me foot in your arse!

Yes, Jane, this is what I think you sound like.  ;)

I drove to a few other pharmacies but got the same look at each.  You would have thought that I was asking for powdered unicorn horn or a fucking phoenix feather.  I spent several hours calling around to pretty much every major pharmacy chain in southwestern Ontario to no avail.  I was stuck with Monday.  Tears were shed, teeth were gnashed...you know the drill.  Adding insult to injury was the fact that, if the Czech clinic had gotten back to me in a timely fashion after my donor's appointment, I would have had tons of time last week to get this stuff lined up.  I did my best to let it go, but the anxiety stuck with me all weekend and I was terrified I was going to start spotting or something and the whole damn DE cycle was going to have to be rescheduled.

Of course, I emailed all of this to the Czech clinic, and got a reply this morning saying that they thought starting the pills on Monday would be just fine.  Which is what I've done.

So much stress and worry.  For basically nothing.  I think I'm going crazy.

Finding emo

I think today was the kind of day they meant when they came up with the phrase "one of those days".

I'll back up a bit first and fill you guys in on what's been going on with our donor egg situation.  Last time I posted about it, we had just chosen our donor from a list of five women provided by our clinic.  We picked donor #3, but also mentioned #1 as an alternate just in case.  That turned out to be a good thing because the clinic got back to us saying that #3 wasn't available.  No big deal, and donor #1 was booked to go in for a checkup with the clinic on May 19th.  We paid our deposit and waited for an update.

Of course it wouldn't be a true IVF cycle for me without timing issues.  It seems like we've always had something scheduled that meant that there was stress over timing, whether it be clinic closures or holidays or business trips.  You'd think we were the world's busiest people, when in fact we're actually remarkably boring and lazy.

Fuck stairs.

This time around, the hiccups are my dance recital at the end of June and a friend's wedding in Vancouver at the end of July.  That still leaves pretty much a whole month for us to do this thing, which seemed reasonable to me given that we only need to be there for a week to ten days (arrive in time for retrieval and fertilization, leave five days later after transfer, although we'll probably tack on a few days on either side to be safe).  

I mentioned our time restrictions right off the bat to the clinic, and told them if it was a problem then we would just prefer to schedule something for the end of the summer.  They said it should be fine.   When we chose our donor, I again mentioned the June/July window and asked if they thought we would make it.  It seemed a little tight to me for a full IVF cycle (assuming full Lupron suppression before stim phase), but they again said it should be fine.  I emphasized the need to be back in Canada in time for the wedding, and they replied telling me that I would probably be looking at a transfer around June 20th.  Way earlier than I expected...and the exact date of my dance recital.  Which I had already told them.

I wrote back and reminded them that I wasn't available to leave Canada until after that date.  I mean, I could theoretically bail on the recital but at this late stage of the game that would be a real dick move.  The clinic said no problem, and that they would know more after the donor had her checkup on May 19th.  That was this past Monday, and despite me sending a chaser email on Tuesday asking how things went, we've yet to receive a reply.  

They're usually quite prompt in getting back to me.  Due to the time difference (6 hours) I usually receive an email the next morning after I send them one, so for the past few mornings I've been waking up and immediately checking my phone for emails from them.  Nada.  If I'm being reasonable then it's probably not that big a deal, because I'm sure the doctor needs to review the donor's results and look at my schedule and try to plan things out first.  But I'm an impatient control freak with paranoid tendencies, so I'm starting to worry that the time window won't work/the donor has bailed/we've been scammed out of our money.  I'm also stressing about booking affordable flights to Prague and getting a reasonably priced hotel or vacation rental during the middle of the summer (none of which we can do without firm dates), on top of all the obvious worries I have about whether the cycle will work or not.  

Getting back to today, things got off to a shitty start when I woke up and saw that yet again I had no correspondence from the clinic.  I got cranky, and ended up snapping at M for (almost) no reason before heading to work.  Then at work, I ended up forgetting to do something that I thought was really important.  When I finally remembered, I called the people I was supposed to do it for and asked them how they wanted me to deal with the situation.  It took three hours of me stewing in my own stress before they eventually called me back and told me it was no big deal and not to worry about it.  At that point I was done and just wanted to go home.

Or do this.

I feel like infertility is one of those things where you can be totally ok for a long time, but when it catches up to you it just makes it so that everything is too much.  Today I didn't really have that bad a day, but I just felt overwhelmed by the unfairness of it all.  I don't want to be having frustrating email exchanges with people halfway around the world to have a family.  I just want to be normal.  I don't want to have to do this anymore.  I'm tired of it.

Upon arriving home I used my favorite new iPhone app Songza to find an appropriately depressing playlist, poured myself a glass of wine, and let the tears flow.  It was totally emo, and totally cathartic.  While I can't say I feel 100% better, tomorrow is another day.  Who knows, maybe I'll even have email.

The Never-Ending Battle

I've been fighting a battle for almost three years.  A battle to grow and nurture something, although Mother Nature seems to have other plans.

Oh, did you think I was talking about the inside of my uterus?  My bad.  I was talking about my lawn.

Behold the majesty of my kingdom.

When M and I bought our house a few years ago, we knew that there'd be some frustrations with home ownership and maintenance.  Stuff like a roof needing repair, or an old furnace needing replacement, or just general minor crap around the house that would need upkeep.  But the lawn?  We kind of figured it would pretty much just take care of itself.  Cut it, water it occasionally, and it would be fine!  I mean, grass grows all kinds of places all on its own, without people even taking care of it, right?

Yeah.  Not so much.  

The three-pronged assault on our green space began in the backyard, where we discovered occasional dry patches that just weren't responding to our usual watering.  Turns out this is because the grass was being eaten from beneath by an infestation of disgusting fat white beetle larvae.  Since most pesticides are banned in Ontario, our only real option to get rid of them is to use nematodes, which are basically freeze-dried microscopic parasites.  You add water (think sea monkeys!) and spray them on your lawn, where they are supposed to chow down on the grubs while leaving your lawn untouched.  Great in theory, however applying them to your lawn is incredibly finicky.  You need a certain temperature range, damp soil, no sun for a couple of days, a full moon, a blood sacrifice to the Norse gods...well ok I made some of that up but it seriously felt like working a magic spell and we obviously did it wrong since we still have grubs.

Magic!

The super awesome part about having grubs is that they're just the first wave of destruction.  They spend all summer weakening your lawn's root system so that in the fall, when they're nice and fat and delicious, raccoons have no trouble at all tearing up your dead yellow grass to get at the delectable little treats.  Don't let their cute little masked faces fool you; raccoons are assholes.  They were pulling up huge strips of grass and rolling it back like demented little anti-landscapers, meaning that there were literally mornings that we would look out our window and see huge swaths of bare dirt where there had been relatively healthy grass the night before.  If he wouldn't have been arrested for animal cruelty, M would have gotten himself a BB gun and sat out there in the dark so that he could take care of the little fuckers Clint Eastwood style.

With the backyard essentially a lost cause, we at least took solace in the fact that our front lawn looked nice.  That is, until we went on vacation last year and came back to find that the pretty little blue flowers we'd seen on our lawn in the spring had been warning signs of a weed called "ground ivy" which had now overtaken pretty much the entire front yard.  Ground ivy is also called "creeping charlie" which is fitting because getting rid of this shit is like going up against the goddamn Viet Cong.

You can try to weed it by hand, but it's an exercise in futility because it's basically a vine that crawls along the surface of the soil and sets new roots every inch or so.  At each node it sends out new vines so you end up with a web of the stuff running under your grass.  The first time I tried to pull it up I ended up feeling like that scene in The Hurt Locker where Jeremy Renner (ugly? hot? I can't decide) thinks he's digging up one bomb and ends up pulling up a bunch of wires and realizing he's surrounded by bombs.

Like this, but much less explode-y

Yet again, pretty much anything that will kill this stuff is not available in Ontario.  One home remedy is to use diluted Borax, which apparently upsets the chemical composition of the ivy enough to kill it without damaging the lawn.  I have to say that I find it oddly fitting that I'll be using the same chemical that Sam and Dean used to kill the Leviathans on Supernatural (seriously, you guys still aren't watching this show??), but given our lack of success with the nematodes we'll probably just end up killing the whole lawn entirely.  Which, at this point, might be a mercy.  We should probably just light the whole thing on fire and start over.

This would be so much more satisfying.

Fitness frustrations

You guys, I am in serious danger of falling off the fitness wagon.  

As you may recall, during my first year dealing with infertility, I kind of let everything slide.  I was depressed, I ate, I stopped working out, and I consequently put on about 10 pounds and generally felt like shit.  Then, I smartened up a little and started using fitness as an outlet to deal with infertility issues.  We signed up for a fruit and vegetable delivery service and started eating better.  I didn't join a gym, but I started doing various workout DVD programs (Chalene Johnson's TurboFire and Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred and Ripped in 30) about 5 days a week in our basement.  I gradually dropped the extra poundage and started feeling good about myself again.

Then, in January, I decided to mix things up a little.  I'd been pretty heavily into cardio, and though the Jillian Michaels programs in particular had a bit of light strength work in them, I'd been reading a lot about how lifting heavier weights can be really beneficial for women.  I decided to cut back on the sweat sessions and focus more on muscle building, so I asked M to get me the ChaLean Extreme program (also by Chalene Johnson) for Christmas.  It's a DVD program that mixes three days of heavy lifting per week with two days of abs, cardio interval training and a little yoga for stretching.  

At first I loved the new program, and quickly realized that I could lift a lot more weight than I initially expected.  The scale started going up a little bit, but I knew I was putting on muscle so I wasn't worried about it.   The program is split into three one-month phases and online reviews pretty universally said that after gaining a little muscle weight in the first two months, in the third month I could expect a significant fat loss due to my newly increased metabolism and muscle mass.  While I'm at a pretty healthy weight already and had no illusions about getting shredded, I thought I might at least finally get rid of my stubborn belly pooch and start seeing some nice definition in my arms.  

Instead...I hit a plateau.  Not only did I not lose any fat, but I stopped making any strength progress.  I was supposed to be hitting muscle failure between 10 and 12 reps.  For instance, once I could consistently do 12 reps of bicep curls with 15-pound weights, I decided to add the next weight increment (which, on my dumbbell set, is 2.5 pounds).  The number of bicep curls I could complete at 17.5 pounds?  A pathetic four.  I ended up having to increase only one side of the dumbbell (leaving me with an off-kilter 16.25 pounds) which got me back up to 10 reps.  But I've been stuck here for weeks.  Seriously, it seems like 1.25 pounds should be nothing, but to my biceps it's a mountain they just can't climb.  

I started maxing out on a bunch of other exercises too, so I decided to do some reading online and discovered that maybe I should be adding more protein to my diet.  Unfortunately, this meant that I had to start tracking my food intake again, which I absolutely hate because it makes me obsessive and irritable.  Also, unless you like snacking on canned tuna at 10:30am, getting enough protein in your diet is HARD.  I spent way too much time on MyFitnessPal being told that I couldn't have an apple for a snack unless I was wrapping it in meat. 

C'mon, it's even funnier because this is an infertility blog.  IRONY!

At the end of the third month, I was completely frustrated.  Which is probably stupid, because I still made some pretty good strength gains at the beginning of the program.  Unfortunately, being frustrated means that I'm now also totally demotivated.  I've stopped working out as regularly (I'm down to about 3 times per week) and I've been eating a ton more crap than usual.  I know myself well enough to know that this is the danger zone where I either need to get back on track or else risk fucking off from a healthy lifestyle entirely, until I gain weight and the whole cycle starts again.  The problem is I don't know how to find my motivation!  I had thought about starting P90X next, but even watching the first video made me want to vomit and I just don't know if I can find the time commitment since most of the workouts are so much longer than what I've been doing (between 60 to 90 minutes, 6 days per week).

I need your help, internets.  How do I kick my own ass into gear before I lose all the progress I've made? 

Lucky number three

Holy shitballs.  We have donors.  Several, in fact!

Late last week we got an email from our Czech clinic with a list of five potential donors.  We received basic profiles including their year of birth, height, weight, hair colour, eye colour, blood type, education level, and hobbies.  No photographs, in keeping with the Czech legal requirement for anonymity.  But one other important tidbit: three of the five had previously donated with resulting pregnancies, while a fourth had her own child.  Lots of great eggs to choose from!

In a way, I'm kind of glad that we're receiving minimal information on our donors.  We all know that I'm an anal-retentive researcher, so if I had huge profiles to look through I'd probably be stymied for weeks and then forever wonder if I'd made the right decision.  

At the same time, having limited information meant that there was relatively little to set the donors apart from one another since they had all been chosen to specifically match me as closely as possible.  In the end, we went with practicality first:  we wanted a proven donor.  Of those, we chose the one who most closely resembled me based on the characteristics on paper.  Our final choice:  lucky bachelorette number three!  With our third wedding anniversary just a few days away, and this being our third egg retrieval and transfer, it actually seems kind of fitting.  We're now waiting for the clinic to get in touch with her to confirm, then arrange scheduling and treatment plans.

This is really happening.  There is a real person out there who might give me eggs.  Holy shitballs.

I choo-choo-choose you!

It turns out that choosing a donor egg clinic overseas is a lot like internet dating for your uterus.  You spend a lot of time browsing through profiles online, looking for features you want and filtering out the ones you don't.  Outdoorsy?  Yes.  Gainfully employed?  Yes and yes!  Ugh, is that a shirtless photo?  He's probably a douchebag.  Wait, there's a photo of him posing in front of his sportscar.  DEFINITELY a douchebag.

I rest my case.

In our case, looking at basic criteria online proved to be pretty useless.  For instance, price for DEIVF in the Czech Republic is pretty standard across the board.  You can do it a bit cheaper in smaller cities like Brno or Zlin, but since we'd be flying into Prague (and spending the five days between fertilization and transfer there sightseeing) we'd just end up using what we saved on the procedure for extra travel.  One thing I did find to be key here was looking at exactly what was included in the price of treatment.  Some clinics offered a lower base cost, but stuff like ICSI, assisted hatching or extended cultivation were extra.  I tended to prefer the clinics that didn't mess around and had an all-in price for everything you need.

Success rates also proved to be a bit of a red herring, since pretty much every single clinic advertised a DE clinical pregnancy rate around 60 to 65%.  Ongoing pregnancy rates (based on fetal heartbeat) were generally in the 50% range, which makes sense considering that even young, healthy women have roughly a 20% chance of miscarriage.  Obviously there were small differences of a percent here or there, but not enough to make any one clinic stand out to us as really good or really bad.  The numbers were also on par with US clinics, which was a comfort as well.

Things started to fall into place when we began looking at the guarantee programs.  Unfortunately, Czech clinics don't offer US-style "live birth in X cycles or your money back" guarantees.  They do however guarantee at least 6 eggs retrieved, with 2 high-quality embryos to transfer.  If this doesn't happen for any reason, they will do a new cycle for free.  Some clinics go further and will offer you free or discounted future cycles if you are not pregnant after a few tries.  This was a big attraction for me, since only clinics that have high success rates will risk losing money by giving away a cycle based on this guarantee.  However, this is also where reading the fine print became important, because not everyone's definition of success was the same.  One clinic would have considered "pregnant" to be a positive HCG test!  Sorry kids, but I've had one of those and that's just not gonna cut it.

After a lot of reading I settled on a few contenders and reached out via email.  All of them got back to me very quickly (using excellent English) and asked me to fill out some forms with basic info about ourselves and our infertility history.  There was some back and forth with questions about guarantee programs, drug protocols and waiting times.  Then, we got asked on a date.  A Skype date, that is.

The first clinic to offer us a Skype consult did so very quickly.  It felt kind of rushed, like that guy you meet on Lavalife (I'm totally dating myself here) who asks for your number in his first email.  Being newbies, we accepted, and like most first dates, it was a bit disastrous.

Because the Czech Republic is 6 hours ahead of us and we wanted to avoid arranging a Skype consult during midday at work, we scheduled something in the early morning before we left for the office.  On the appointed day we dragged ourselves out of bed super early, got ready for work and then sat nervously before the computer, waiting for our 6am call.  When it came, we could see the RE....but we couldn't hear him.  He could hear us, apparently, so I told him that there was obviously a technical issue.  After much fiddling around, him mouthing what I assume was "can you hear me now?" and me shrugging, we agreed (through text messaging) to sign off and try again the next day. 

Perhaps it was a result of rousing ourselves at an ungodly hour for a second day in a row, but we both felt that the consult itself was underwhelming.  While the RE seemed very nice, he didn't really do much beyond tell us what we already knew about his clinic and then asked if we had questions.  I asked a little bit about donor selection and timing, but started to get a little concerned when he talked about their usual "morula transfer".  For whatever reason, this clinic does primarily Day 4 transfers which seemed a bit odd to me, and suggestive that their lab was maybe not good enough to get an embryo all the way to Day 5.  Both M and I agreed afterwards to keep looking, but did think it was pretty cute when the RE translated birth control as "anti-baby pills". 

Our second Skype consult with the next clinic went much better.  The RE had clearly read my file and actually started off discussing the fact that with my age and average number of eggs retrieved, he would suggest pursuing a few more cycles of IVF with my own eggs first.  I liked this a lot, since on paper I don't look as dismal a case as I've proven to be in real life.  Also, IVF costs a lot less than DEIVF and this helped me to feel comfortable that he was looking at me as a patient and not a bank account.  We talked about my issues with poor egg quality, and then moved on to discuss their donor program.  Unlike the other clinic we Skyped with, they prefer Day 5 single embryo transfers, which is much more in line with the standards we've come to expect here in Canada.  Both M and I finished the consult feeling really positive about this place, and eventually we decided not to bother Skyping with the other clinics that I was emailing and just go with our gut on clinic #2.

On top of the great impression made by the RE (who spoke flawless English and has almost 20 years experience in the field), this clinic also impressed me with their response to my query about their guarantee program.  They advertise the third cycle free if the first two fail, and I wanted to know how they defined "success": was it a positive HPT, fetal heartbeat or live baby?  The lovely woman that I'd been emailing wrote back with "A live birth, of course, what other measure of success would there be?", which gave me the warm fuzzies and made me feel like this clinic just got it.  The only thing that causes me even the slightest hesitation is the fact that this clinic is quite new (having opened in Fall 2013), so their success rates are based on a much smaller sample size and there are limited reviews from previous patients online.  What I can find is good, and of course one of the benefits of them being new is that there is no real waiting time, so we could potentially cycle there as early as July.  Their facility is also new and pretty state-of-the-art.  The downside is that, if things don't go well, I'll probably be kicking myself for making a bad choice and not going with one of the longer-standing clinics.  Given the pedigree and professionalism of the people I've dealt with so far, though, I'm really hoping that won't be an issue.

As a postscript to my little internet dating metaphor, once we'd made our choice I had to write to the other clinics I'd been speaking with to let them know that we wouldn't be proceeding further.  This should have been easy ("Hi, thanks for all the info, we've decided on another clinic") and yet, I am a total spazz.  I don't know if I thought that their feelings would be hurt, or if I'd get uncomfortable emails asking which other clinic and why, but I LIED.  Just like telling a guy that I didn't want to go on another date because I decided to get back together with an ex-boyfriend (really, it's because you drank an entire litre of cheap wine and then asked to sleep on my couch because you didn't want to take the bus)*, I told the other clinics that I was going to try again with my own eggs and would keep their information for later.  Like they care.  I'm such a dork.

*scenario may or may not have been drawn from actual life

A little good news

My mom got the results of her breast surgery back on Friday.  There were nice clear margins around the lump they removed, and her lymph nodes were clear as well.  She still needs a bit of follow up (likely some radiation and possibly hormone treatment), but overall it's the best possible outcome she could have hoped for.   We're all so overjoyed to finally get a bit of good news for a change!

The past couple of weeks have actually been some of the best I've had in a while in terms of mood and energy.  It all started with my trip home to see my family after my mom's surgery a few weeks ago, which probably did me just as much good as it did for her.  My dad was the only one who knew about my visit, which I feared for a while was going to lead to disaster since he couldn't seem to wrap his head around the basics of lying to his wife.  I kept having to field questions about how he was going to get to the airport to pick me up without her knowing (answer: tell her you're going to the hardware store, where you routinely disappear for hours so she definitely won't want to come) or how he was going to stop her from sending my birthday present in the mail (obvious answer: take it and tell her you'll mail it, then DON'T MAIL IT).  It was hilarious and cute at the same time, and reassured me that my dad would never be able to pull off having a secret second family somewhere.  

Despite my doubts, Dad came through in the end and my mom's reaction (huge hug, incoherent happy tears) was definitely worth it.  Then we pulled together an impromptu 38th birthday party for me and had a big family dinner to celebrate.

The rest of the week was spent doting on my 4-year old niece, to whom I am now the awesomest person on planet earth.  We coloured Disney princesses, had a sleepover, braided each other's hair, did each other's makeup (Rocky Horror Picture Show mean anything to anyone??), went shopping, ate ice cream, skipped rope, watched "Frozen", danced about a thousand times to Pharrell's "Happy", and in general had an absolute blast.  I loved everything about being the cool aunt, and it makes me wish we lived closer to my family so I could do it more often.  By day two my niece was begging to stay home from day care so that we could hang out, and at the end of my trip she was talking about how soon she could come to Toronto to visit me.  Man, I love that kid!!

The return home to M and Buddy was bittersweet, but on the plus side spring has finally come to Toronto after what has felt like the longest winter EVER.  We've had some great weather the past couple of weekends, which has allowed us to finally get outside and clear up all of the branches and debris from the ice storm that we had just before Christmas.  We still need to hire some tree and lawn people to help with the last of the cleanup and recovery, but at least our neighbours aren't embarrassed by us anymore.

Finally, we're pretty close to narrowing down our clinic for donor egg in the Czech Republic.  We have had a few Skype consults and I'll share more about our selection process in a later post.  Also, on Friday I was psyched to see that the province of Ontario has announced that it will begin funding one cycle of IVF starting in 2015.  While it's a bit late for me, it's a huge step in the right direction for other infertile couples and goes a long way to helping a lot of people who otherwise couldn't afford it.  All in all, lots to feel good about!