Remember the hurdles analogy I keep referencing to? Well, Laryen and I were about to embark on the biggest hurdle of them all — having to pay for us to get pregnant. If you think about it, it’s not like we didn’t know it wasn’t coming. We had already paid so much money to get us to this point; insurance paid for some of it, but not all of it. (p.s. insurance usually doesn’t pay for ANY infertility treatments. It might cover a few appointments or non-infertility medications but for the most part, you’re on your own! Which I still feel is b.s. because remember 1 in 8 couples have some sort of infertility, so it’s not as rare as one would think, thus I think insurance should pay for some of it!)

Sorry…I get a little worked up about all of that 😉 Anyway, Laryen and I were really hopeful it wouldn’t get to the $$ part of infertility. But when it did it was a really weird feeling. You had so much more in the game. It was almost like we were gambling for a baby – without going to Las Vegas.

The first gamble we took was doing an IUI, or intrauterine insemination. It’s where they put the sperm inside the uterus taking away some of the obstacles and making it easier for the sperm to find the egg! The swimmers are “washed” so the bad sperm are gone leaving the “good” sperm behind. The process is done right after ovulation so you know the timing is perfect. We knew this was our best chance so far to get pregnant. But we still needed to ‘pay the man.’ $1,090 per IUI, plus the trigger shot to tell my eggs to ovulate, and Clomid to help me produce multiple eggs to increase our chances. So you’re looking at around $1,200 total per IUI.

And even though this was our best chance so far, it was still a gamble. (FYI: I’m going to throw a whole bunch of numbers at you for a second.) A normal couple trying to get pregnant only has a 20% chance every month they’ll get pregnant. Now for us, Dr. Huang said our chances were more like 2%! An IUI increases that chance to between 7%-18%, making us fall into that ‘normal’ range. But even so, it still wasn’t the best odds. Laryen said it best: “If someone had a gun and gave me a million dollars and said there was only a 15% chance that they would hit me, I’d take the money and let them shoot at me. There’s an 85% chance they WOULDN’T hit me.” Morale of the story…the chances aren’t that high. But for us, it was a SIGNIFICANTLY higher chance and the best chance we’ve ever had!

So we had our first IUI in August of 2015, followed by 2 others shortly after.

All of them ended up not working …. which was very heartbreaking. IUI #1 was really hard on Laryen. For me I was bummed out of course, but knew we had a better chance the second time around (the meds stay in your system, making the next time more of a chance of being successful). So when IUI #2 came back negative, I was devastated. When we started the IUI process, Dr. Huang told us we should do it 3 times. Now, it doesn’t mean that if you did it 4, 5 or even 10 times that it wouldn’t work. He knew a lot of women who got pregnant after lots of IUI’s. But like you can see in this picture below, the chances don’t keep going up. They level off. And if the IUI is supposed to work, statistically it’ll work in the first 3 tries.

Unlike the saying, the third time wasn’t the charm for us. We were bummed out but knew the chances were still really low that it would work anyways. We had to keep moving forward, and we knew that every IUI was getting us closer to our end results of becoming parents. After unsuccessful IUI #3 I remember Laryen saying, “can we get our money back?” Laughter is really important to both of us and it’s helped us through this whole process. And if you’re wondering, no….you can’t get your money back, lol.

Now that brings us to where we are today. The second gamble: IVF, or invitro fertilization. Heard of the word test tube baby? Well that’s the old school way of saying that a baby was made through IVF. (and a more accurate saying would be petri-dish baby, btw). IVF is where they take the eggs out of me and fertilize them with Laryen’s sperm in a lab. Once they’re fertilized they put them back in me and, just like any other pregnancy, a healthy, beautiful baby grows! And if you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m an open and honest person and this is part of our story so I don’t mind telling you how much it’ll cost us.

We’re looking at $15,000 (on the low end) per IVF. YIKES!!!!! But got.to.stay.positive.and.keep.going. We got a loan and we’ll pay it off — there’s no way we can say it’s not worth it. It is, of course it is. We just pray that our kiddos are both super smart and really athletic to get a lot of scholarships for college 🙂

Let me tell you, science is amazing. The fact that they can actually do ANY of this stuff BLOWS MY MIND! It’s jaw-dropping awesomeness and kind of overwhelming. Just check out this drawing my doctor drew when we went in for our IVF consultation.

That’s the whole process, squeezed into an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of paper. I’m a visual learner so it helped me break down the process in my head (even though I did put it in a drawer right after we met with him and didn’t bring it back out to look at until weeks later.) I won’t go into all the details of how it works, but I’ll try my best to explain the process in an IVF-nutshell.

IVF is just like any normal pregnancy, except all the fertilization happens outside the body and in a lab. The doctor pumps me up with a lot of extra hormones (in the form of shots that I need to give myself) so I produce multiple eggs. Once the doctor takes the eggs out of me (a quick hour-long surgery), they are brought to the lab where they are fertilized!

 

A teeny needle inserts 1 teeny tiny sperm into each egg (the process is called ICSI) and the miracle of life begins.

 

 

Over the next 3-5 days, the cells divide, and divide again and again, etc until they become embryos. And once they have enough cells (at that stage they’re called blastocysts), 2 of the eggs are put back into me and (fingers crossed) they like my warm cozy uterus and want to stay for there oh 9 months or so. 🙂

 

Some of you may be wondering, how many eggs do they get? Well, 18 or 20 eggs isn’t unrealistic. But all those eggs aren’t going to be good…some might be overripe or not 100% developed. And even after they’re fertilized not all of them are going to get to that last stage. In our doctor’s example if you have 12 mature eggs and fertilized them all, on average only 4 will develop into healthy embryos.

Some of you also might be wondering, why don’t they put all the fertilized eggs back in you so you have a better chance at getting prego? Well, 1) I don’t want to be Octomom and 2) it actually doesn’t increase your chances. Not all doctors are the same, but my doctor won’t put more than 2 embryos back in during IVF. Our clinics stats over the past couple of years look like this: With 2 embryos you have a 70% chance of having a positive pregnancy test (yay!) and a 50% of a viable pregnancy meaning there’s a heartbeat. That’s what is scary – still not 100% but it’s damn good odds if I do say so myself. It’s also not healthy for mom or baby(ies) if there’s too many in there. The risk is just not worth it. So we’re gambling on those 2 🙂

Another question we had is what happens to the other fertilized eggs? They go right into the freezer (no, not next to the ice cream in ours at home) at the lab. Those eggs are good for 10+ years, so when we’re ready for another baby we’ll do a FET or frozen embryo transfer which seems like a pretty simple process compared to IVF. You can also donate the eggs to another couple who can’t get pregnant or even donate them to research, so lots of possibilities to look into in the future.

Well, that nutshell was a lot bigger than I intended (sorry!) but I think it’s a good breakdown of the whole IVF process. And for Laryen and I, it’s almost here! It’s hard to explain how we are feeling about it. We are excited of course, but nervous and feel like we kind of have a grasp on the whole process, but in reality we have NO IDEA what the next month or two is going to entail. Every IVF couple is different and there will be a lot more hurdles we have to get through before we see those two pink lines. But we’re taking the leap, tossing the dice and spinning the wheel…

all to FINALLY make our family complete.