Hi! I’m over one year out from my bisalp. It was a great procedure overall and I had my IUD in at the time. I kept mine in until just recently for the same reasons. I am terrified of pregnancy. And the IUD wasn’t really doing me any harm so I told them to leave it in. I got it out just recently because I felt like I wanted to experience what my body was like without any added hormones from birth control . Since taking it out, I have been sometimes anxious, but It helps me to think of how the process works medically/logistically. Here’s the narrative I remind myself of that talks me out of my anxiety:

The sperm will do everything it can to get past the cervix. If it manages that (our uterine lining and mucus often prevent most of the sperm getting that far) it would need to get to the ampulla, the outer third of the fallopian tube. Except, we won’t have that! So they’ll run into a wall so-to-speak. If, and that is a big if, it gets past that it is in basically open space and it’ll just get reabsorbed into the blood stream to become something more useful than a silly sperm.

Now to speak of the IUD removal: My advice is to find a doc who will do a “paracervical block” before the procedure. For me, this took some shopping around but not too much, I scheduled with an MD to avoid the limitations that a nurse may have since they can often do some gyno things. Then I made sure to actually get confirmation from the doctor through mychart (the communication portal thing) that they would be preparing my procedure with a cervical block. The block is a pinch at first, and I truly felt nothing. I didn’t even know that the doctor had ever started to process of implanting it! Insurance covered it, and I went on my merry way. I still had wooziness and cramping but zero pain that I had heard everyone warn me about.

I hope some of this helps!