Moving right along! After we got the car on Friday it was time to pick up the medications. This is going to require a little bit of a backstory- as promised.

Back in May, Marietta (my IVF coordinator with EmbryoLab) sent me information for an international pharmacist that I would need to order the medications from. I reached out to Dimitrios via What’sApp and he already had all the information he needed from EmbryoLab. Here I am, sitting in Palm Coast, Florida, talking to a man I don’t even know is real and asking him how to pay him for medications from across the world. He sent me a total (for those of you following along to see if this is a viable option for you, I am keeping track of totals as we go and will post a spreadsheet when it is all said and done. If you’d like to know anything sooner, just reach out and I’ll send you a breakdown of what it’s been so far) and a weblink and I sent a few thousand dollars out into the universe. He said the medications would be in a lockbox in the city waiting for me when I got there. This was one of the biggest “trust the process” moments we’ve had yet. But, I figured we had built a relationship with Marietta and trusted her, so we needed to trust that she wasn’t leading me astray.

Ok, so back to Friday. When we pulled up to the address that Dimitrios had given for the lockbox, we were looking at a huge industrial loading warehouse that looked like it hadn’t been used in years. Oh no. Not going to lie, panic started to creep in. Luckily, Kyle is pretty good at keeping calm and drove around to the other side of the parking lot- where there was a shopping mall. We stil had no clue what we were looking for, but at least we could find someone to ask for help here. A mall employee pointed us to the BoxNow station on the outside of the mall. We found our box and used the code that Dimitrios had sent and to my relief, there was a pretty big box in there with my name on it! One big plus of where we were was that the mall had a Skalvenitis Hypermarket in it – kind of like a Super WalMart – so we got groceries and anything else we would need to get our stay started.

Our AirBnB is lovely. We’re definitely adjusting to city living (tight quarters!) but we have a comfy bed, a kitchen, a washing machine, two balconies, and air conditioning! We’re centrally located, so we can walk to several restaurants and the beautiful waterfront park, and we’re less than a 15 minute drive to EmbryoLab, which is nice, because we will be there every few days for the first two weeks. We had our first appointment there on Saturday and we were amazed by the clinic. It’s so much bigger than I ever imagined, and felt every bit as clean as we would expect. Everyone we came in contact with was so friendly and made the experience easy. We finally met Marietta face-to-face, and she was just as wonderful in person as she was virtually. We both had to do some blood work to check hormone levels, and I had an EKG. Marietta told us that the bloodwork would be looked at by the doctors and we would get an email with further instructions in about 5 hours. Before we left, she gave me a big hug and I could feel any bit of anxiety that I had about making the right decision by being here melt away.

After the appointment, we did a little bit of exploring in the city. Touristy stuff along the way is something else that I will be making a comprehensive list of at the end of our stay, so in these posts I’ll keep it a little shorter. While we were at the waterfront by the White Tower, we got an email from Marietta with the results from our appointment. My hormone levels were exactly where they wanted them to be (in the 6 weeks leading up to getting here I had been on hormonal birth control pills that varied in dosage as the weeks progressed), so that’s great news! She gave us our instructions for the next few days: one metered dose injection of Puregon every night through July 3rd. Our next appointment will be Thursday, July 4th to have an ultrasound and determine the next step.

Sunday we got to do even more exploring. We went to the historic district of Ano Poli at the top of the hill overlooking the city of Thessaloniki. We had the best taxi driver on the way up who could have just been our personal tour guide. He dropped us off at Heptapyrgion, a prison that was first built in the 14th century. From here, we had some of the best views I’ve seen to date. Looking out over the entire city stretched out to the sea was breathtaking. We slowly worked our way down the hill stopping at other historical monuments as well as a few local spots to take in the views. Don’t worry, I’m making a list! I’m not sure that Thessaloniki is a huge tourist destination, especially when you compare it to the islands of Greece, but let me tell you- if you get the chance, you won’t regret a trip here. It’s truly incredible to be in a city with this much history, and be surrounded by people who have immense pride for it. We can’t wait to soak more in.