MIA Conference

I know, I know...get on to the results, right? I'm sorry but yesterday we had the Inaugural MIA Conference and it was too amazing to not blog about it right away.

When we headed to the conference, we had almost 160 people register and ended up with about 130 that actually showed up! There were a few hiccups but after discussing it at dinner after the conference and ALL day today with my mom, I'm going to focus on the positives rather than the negatives. You can't please everyone and in the end, we reached so many people going through the crazy infertility journey that it's just so OVERWHELMING! One couple came up to all three of us after the conference, not knowing any of us, and both the husband and wife gave us big hugs and thanked us...that my friends, it what it was all about!
Dr. K spoke on egg donation and Dr. Miyagi (the fellow) attended the entire conference. I FINALLY got to meet him! He was my inside guy & gave me feedback throughout the afternoon. Even though I hadn't met him, only dealt with him the night of the missed meds & tweeted him 5 million ?s (which he always answers), I felt like we were good buddies. At the end of the conference, he came to me and said, "I really like male infertility..." and I said, "Well I don't!" He laughed and nodded that he knew that but made a great suggestion that he could lead a discussion next year on male infertility for all the husbands or something along those lines.

I'm so glad they were both able to attend and support us. I'm hoping that maybe I can work with them to get more patient to patient support at my/their clinic.
During the general session, I saw this husband reach over and grab his wife's hand. I almost cried because really, the most important thing during your infertility journey is support.
We raffled off a FREE IVF CYCLE! Yes, you heard me right a FREE CYCLE! This was the couple that won, well, actually we drew the husband's name so HE won. They were stunned, shocked, grateful, amazed...I could go on. I was (again!) almost crying because you could just see how grateful they were. Dr. S, who donated the cycle, didn't bring a gift certificate or anything so he just wrote them an IOU note!
So, overall, MIA conference year 1-done! I'm so exhausted but it was soooo worth it. Thanks to everyone who attended and supported this!