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

We are here!!!

Hey everyone!

Well we have only been at the hotel/hospital for a couple of hours now, but I wanted to post so you all know we made it safe and sound.  We got here at 7 pm Turkish time.  We are 8 hours ahead of Texas and ten hours ahead of all you guys out in Cali!

Everything went great without hitch!  I didn't have any problems getting through security with all the injectable meds I was having to carry, our luggage arrived exactly as it was suppose to, and our driver was waiting right outside the airport with a sign for us and everything!  We couldn't have been more pleased.  Minus the fact that it's so cramped on the airplane that neither of us really slept on the flights, maybe an hour total.  So we are pretty much running on empty considering we have now been up for 36 hours straight or maybe more my brain is too fried to do the math!

It took us a while to get here due to layovers and so forth.  We left Dallas at 3:25 pm yesterday.  Then of course you add 8 hours to that for the time difference, so it was really like we were leaving out at 11 pm Turkish time.  We arrived in Amsterdam at 7:30 am their time, and then our flight for Istanbul didn't leave until noon.  It was a three hour flight from Amsterdam to Istanbul and we gained an hour so that put us getting here after 4:00.  Then we had to go through the visa line and pay $20 each to get a 90 day visa.  Which was a breeze, as was going through customs.  Once going through both of those, our luggage was already there. :)  After fighting off two different Turkish airport dudes that wanted to help take our bags for 5 Euros, we were able to exit the airport and there was our super sweet and nice taxi driver. He had a sign that said Staci Renee and Glen Patrick.  It cracked us up!  No last names, just middle!

The taxi ride from the airport to the hospital was over two hours long, and the hospital is like 30 miles tops from the airport!  The traffic is CRAZY!!  People don't even stay in lanes, merging is an absolute NIGHTMARE! People literally stand in the middle of the interstate between lanes selling bottled water, some pretzel looking things, and roses.  I'm surprised there aren't more fatalities! Oh, and people are whizzing by on motor bikes to add to the chaos!!!  So glad he was driving and not us.  We did get to take some pics along the way that I will add to this blog once I get the chance to upload them to the computer.

Once getting to the hotel/hospital we checked into our room, which is very compact but nice and the best part is that it looks out over the ocean and mountains!!!   I will take pics of the room and view and post those as well!  After dropping everything off, we went over to the hospital and looked around.  Because it took us so long to get here, we weren't able to talk to our main go to person, Seyhan, like was planned.  But she is suppose to call us at 8:30 in the morning and our first appointment with the doctor is at 10:30 in the morning.

Well I guess that's it for us right now.  I will update again tomorrow evening which is really around afternoon for all of you!!

Thank you all again for your support and prayers!  We can already tell this is going to a trip of a life time!!!!

It's crash time!  But at least its night here so we should be able to avoid most jet lag and wake up right on Turkish time!

Oh Yes!  One more thing.  The weather here is totally WONDERFUL!!! It is gorgeous and wonderful to feel a cool breeze and weather that is nice for a change.

Blast off!!! I can't believe it's finally here!!!

Don't know how this blog will turn out I'm messaging it from our phone. So....its 1:45 and we are waiting in the airport to board our flight which takes off at 3:25 pm. We made it through security without a hitch which I'm so thankful for, considering I'm traveling with a huge cooler purse filled with injectable medication. Yipeee!! So now we are sitting here with butterflies in our tummies and lots of excited feelings. The next time I will be posting we will be in Istanbul. We will be 7-8 hours ahead of you guys So my post will probably show up tomorrow afternoon y'alls time.

Thank you all for your prayers and support. We will definitely keep you all up to date and will post lots of pictures!!!

w ur prayers and support. We will definitely keep you all up to date and will post lots of pictures!!!

w s off at 3:25 pm. We made it through security without a hitch which I'm so thankful for, considering I'm traveling with a huge cooler purse filled with i

w Don't know how this blog will turn out I'm messaging it from our phone. So....its 1:45 and we are waiting in the airport to board our flight which take