My husband spent his day with doctors and dieticians. He discovered that he does have diabetes. The guy who never wanted to give me any shots now has to give himself insulin shots. It's funny how things work out. We're not sure yet if he has Type 1 or Type 2. We're hoping it's Type 2, then he can stop taking the insulin shots and control his blood sugar with a pill and/or his diet.

My husband was still in shock about his diabetes diagnosis when I met him at the fertility clinic this afternoon. The whole time the doctor was speaking to us he was sitting there in a daze. I think he got the main drift of what the doctor was saying, but didn't even try to figure out the details. I didn't expect him to when he was thinking about carbohydrates, insulin, and insurance!

Our doctor stressed how he thought that my eggs were good, and that the sperm count was borderline for an IUI. They like it to be at least 5 million, and our best count was nearly that high.

The doctor thought that it might be a good idea for me to have a laparoscopy. That way we can see if there is anything preventing my eggs from getting where they need to go (like a blocked tube).

If there was an abnormality that had to be repaired, he suggested that after the repair we try some IUI cycles of FSH (injectable drugs) trying to get two or three eggs. It might be what we need to get success.

If the laparoscopy showed that everything was normal, he said we had two options. We could try no more than two cycles of FSH with an IUI or we could go right to IVF (In Vitro Fertilization).

He went on to explain IVF, saying that they would try to harvest 10-12 eggs from me, and would inject the sperm individually into each egg. He said that they are able to fertilize 70% of egg with this procedure. I knew that he was talking about IVF with ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection). At my clinic this costs an extra $1000. I asked the doctor if injecting the sperm was the normal thing for counts like what we were dealing with, and he said yes.

He said that in my case they would want to put in no more than two embryos. He didn't talk about freezing embryos, and I didn't ask. I wanted to, but since my husband was in a daze, and IVF wasn't something we had to really think too seriously about yet, I didn't ask anything.

My husband told the doctor about his diabetes and he said that it could affect his sperm count (illness can do that), but probably not significantly. He suggested that my husband have another sperm count in three months to see if there is any change.

That's the basics of what was said. I got a pamphlet to read which tells about laparoscopy. It needs to be done on a Thursday, and I'd need to take the next day off of work. It also needs to be done between days 5 and 11 of my cycle. I think I'll probably have it done next month, as I really am too busy this week (Thursday is Day 7)to skip school for two days. Next month it would fall on Thursday, February 5. So a month from now I could be having surgery. I never imagined this would be happening to me.