Anonymous wrote:
Anonymous wrote:New RE at a new clinic, as soon as you are ready to do so. If your financial/insurance situation allows it, consider having consults with more than 1 and picking the one you're most comfortable/confident with. We received what turned out to be really bad advice from our first RE last year at this time. We followed the advice for 3 months because she was the RE we were established with, I honestly wasn't quite sure what else to do, and was overwhelmed by the thought of going somewhere else to "start over" because what if it turned out to be worse than our experience at the first place. It took a huge toll on my mental health.
Then one of my oldest friends, who has dealt with plenty of her own health problems but not infertility, said to me, "You aren't starting over from scratch. You have pages and pages of records from the first doctor to guide a new doctor's approach." For me that was the first step in the right direction in turning my thinking and outlook around. It gave me the confidence to book appointments at 2 other clinics quickly, and I was specifically able to see REs I had read an extensive number of reviews on (mostly comments here on DCUM). One was a good fit; the other was not. We promptly began moving forward with the good fit and everything fell into place. The way my second clinic did things made for a much more logical and comfortable environment for me, which meant I felt better taken care of and more confident as the process proceeded.
Good luck.
Thank you this is really helpful. May I ask what ended up happening in the 2nd clinic? Were you successful?
I'm the pp of the quoted thread. Since others have brought up specific clinics, I'll mention that my bad experience was at GW, and I switched to Dr. Gordon at Dominion. My diagnosis was RPL--we kept conceiving but never stayed pregnant. The GW RE ran some tests for RPL, told us to keep trying naturally, and left it at that. I expected and assumed she would provide more guidance on next steps once the testing was done-after all, that was her job. I even asked about scheduling a follow-up to discuss the results upon completion of testing, but she said that wouldn't be necessary because she could message me the results. The RPL testing took 2 months after my last miscarriage to complete. The message she sent said, "Your latest test results are normal. I hope you are well." There were some other things about how she handled my case that also majorly factored in, but telling us to just keep trying on our own without changing anything, and then leaving us without a plan were the final pieces that made it clear we needed to leave GW...however, as I said above, I kind of got stuck on the idea of starting over until my friend's encouragement came along.
Before going to Dominion, I did get second opinions from specialists on underlying medical conditions that the GW RE was aware of but didn't seem to factor in to the overall equation of my case. I also saw an MFM for an RPL prenatal conversation.
At Dominion, Dr. G was willing to work with the recommendations the other specialists made, and he outlined all the ART options he would support us in trying. And yes, we were very lucky to have been successful there. We did an IUI and were pregnant 8 weeks after our first consult with him.