Day 2 of Turkey!!!

Hey everyone, we had a great 2nd day.  We saw the doctor for the 1st time.  As we thought, we really like him. He mentioned with humor that he had talked a lot with Staci before.  She had talked over the phone in person with him on a few occasions and he answered several emails.  It is very uncommon for a doctor to willingly spend that much direct communication with a patient, at least from our prior experience.  So meeting him in person was just as enjoyable.  We were glad we chose him to be our doctor.

We met with him in his office and he had a big stack of paperwork.  He said "Look at this".  He said, I know you have your labwork somewhere in here.  This is huge, he thumbed through it like you do with those paper animations you draw when you are a kid with a stack of papers.  Definitely broke the ice.  That paperwork was all the history of paperwork from the past attempts at having a child.  So a lot of our questions were already answered, but we had the chance to sit down with him and get a schedule and plan together.    So we will be seeing him every 2 or 3 days starting Monday at 9.  It looks like we will tentatively have the eggs retrieved somewhere around the 13th.    Then usually four or five days after that we will have the embryo transfer.

So we went into another room and through the ultrasound, Dr. Arici, showed us on each ovary 7 or 8 follacles on one side and 6 or 7 on the other one.  He then suggested a dosage of medication that we are going to use based on the paperwork he had read and how many follacles he saw.  The dosage he perscribed was 225 IU's - once daily in the evening.

Just a note about elevators.  The buttons for floors (on lower levels) are actually numbers instead of letters buttons like we have in the states.  So for example, the ground floor is "0", the basement is "-1" and then the other floors are like "1", "2", etc.  Kind of cool.  Sure gets around the language block.

Also, we had an intern do some translating.  I guess from what we knew, we expected a little more people understanding English.  Not that I can blame them.  We are in a different country, they should speak their language.  I just expected a little more english.  So it is sometimes interesting trying to explain simple things to people to get around the language barrier.  The intern, named Sunny, was sweet and helped us explain things to some of the hospital staff.  The doctor speaks very good english so there was no problem with him.  But some of his staff, it was difficult to explain things.  His nurse was questioning us about medication that was going to be perscribed and the intern was very helpful at mediating and translating for both of us.  And then the staff at our hotel sometimes is challenging.

We found out our schedule from the doctor, and we at the spur of the moment decided to go on an excursion  because this would be the only opportunity for a break.  The remainder of the time we will be focused on the doctor appointments and everything else.  So we had a woman, Seyhan book a plane ticket and hotel for us in Antalya and a driver to provide transportation to and from the airport.  It is an all-inclusive resort on the beach on the south side of Turkey.   It was a 1 hour flight.  As, like last time, there was a driver to pick us up.  But this time, the sign he held up for us to recognize him said "Mr. S. Renee Youngblood".  Maybe next time, they will get it right.  So we arrived here, at the hotel.  It actually is all meals included (breakfast, lunch, dinner).  This hotel is named the Titanic and the shape of the building actually looks like the Titanic.  Kind of cool.  The pools are large, most of them connected.  Then if you continue walking, you will arrive at a sandy beach.  It is like a resort though, where activities are provided.  We were expecting a little cool weather, but it was on the hot side.  If I were to guess it is probably 85.  Still better than Texas, but not as cool as we hoped.  Hopefully in an hour or so it will be cooler.

Since the airport restrictions are the same universally, we were not able to bring our toothpaste, deoderant or sunscreen so we might be stinky and fried!!  LOL.  We will probably end up paying an astronomical amount downstairs to buy travel size of these things, because we had to leave them at our normal hotel in Istanbul.   FYI - this brings up an interesting topic.  It seems that the Turkish people here do not use deoderant.  Staci and I were standing in line and smelt ourselves to see if we stunk.  It turned out that the strange stench was just the guy next to us.  It was really bad.  We weren't close to them either.  It might be the women too, but who knows.  For now we will say it's only the guys.  It was not only on one occasion that we noticed this.

We are actually charged by the hour for wi-fi because we are in a different hotel tonight.  We are in Antalya right now and will be until Sunday night.  So we promise we will post pictures when we get back to our normal hotel where there is free wi-fi.

We hope you are all doing well.  We will post again tomorrow.  Signing off for now Glen and Staci.  I'm sure you will recognize that this isn't as nicely written and therefore you now know that it's me, Glen.  You will have to wait until tomorrow to see who the next author will be.  LOL