January 30, 2013 – Femara

So far Femara has been a lot better than Clomid.  The only real side effect I had was exhaustion.  I would take it at 10 and by 1 it was hard to talk my brain would be so shut down.  On the first day I laid down for a nap and Doc woke me up several hours later asking if I wanted dinner.  Not safe to drive on pill days, for sure. 

Femara is labeled as a drug to treat women with breast cancer (which is really sensitive to estrogen production).  Fertility treatments are an ‘off label’ use for it.  Lots of drugs have off label uses.  For example, Benadryl can also treat nausea. Regardless, we are hopeful that Femara will be more successful than the Clomid was.  We will know in aproximately 22 days.    

  

At the moment we are staying with the clinic here in town, but we have started to look for another place to do the IUI.  I am just not impressed with our current clinic.  This month when I called to ask for the Femara prescription the nurse argued with me that I was already on it and just needed to call the pharmacy for a refill.  I had a hard time convincing her that I have never taken Femara and didn’t have a prescription available for it.  I finally convinced her by asking her which pharmacy they sent the prescription to, for which she didn’t have an answer because they had never sent one in for me before.  I prefer my health care professionals competent or at least capable of reading a chart.  I also have to go back in for the Day 15 sonogram this month if I haven’t had my LH surge because it is a new drug.  I plan on not listening to the tech this time when she tries to convince me to get the IUI early.  Overall, I just feel angry when I have to deal with these people.  I don’t feel like they care and they are really in it for the money, which doesn’t make me feel good at all.  Unfortunately the other clinic is an hour and half away and out of network for our insurance, so it is really hard for me to switch.  Although we may do that if we aren’t pregnant in a couple of months. 

I really miss my regular doctors.  I always knew they were taking excellent care of me, but this experience has reminded me how special it is to find people you really trust to take care of you.  I don’t question their directives because I know they care about the outcome.  With this clinic I feel like I need to do my own research and manage my own care.  Very stressful!  Sadly, they are the only fertility specialists around here.  I know some amazing doctors, but this is just not their specialty.  Hopefully we will only have to work with them for a short time before we go back to the loving care of my amazing doctors.