Today, we are ALL IN.
We signed our consent form for our upcoming IVF.
And we paid for it.
In full.
::Trigger the vomit reflex::
I haven't blogged in awhile due to a myriad of reasons, but today everything got serious, so today I'm back. My first injections for IVF start Friday morning and I will continue shooting up until around the 3rd week of July. While signing all 27 pages of the consent form, I kept reading about how there are never any guarantees. There's no guarantee that our egg and sperm will make an embryo, no guarantee I will become pregnant with that embryo, no guarantee that I won't miscarry the baby if I do get pregnant, no guarantee that the baby won't have any birth defects, etc. etc. etc.
The odds of me actually getting knocked up is a little less that 50%.
So roulette wheel, right? Put your money down. 50% of the time you'll double your money and walk away a winner. 50% of the time, you lose it all.
Well, today we bet $10,656.90 so far. Allllllllll in.
Basic IVF= $7,300
(includes visits, blood work, ultrasounds, trial transfer, egg retrieval with anesthesia, embryo care, embryo transfer back into me)
ICSI = $1,500
(intracytoplasmic sperm injection: This is an extra process we decided to pay for. The embryologist will specifically pick the sperm that look the best and actually inject each mature egg with a hopefully super smart sperm. This has been shown to lead to better fertilization rates.)
Medications =$1,856.90
(so far... I need to contact the second pharmacy in the morning to make a payment on the other half of the medications we need. the office is really good at calling all the pharmacies to determine what to order from where to result in the lowest out of pocket costs)
At a time when everyone tells you to lower your stress and remain calm, they also ask you for 10K. Now, don't get me wrong, we would pay it over and over and over again if we had to. It's just really dis-concerning when we have now emptied our savings, checking, and every spare dollar we had just for a 50/50 chance. Any normal person would say that's crazy. But any infertile couple would do it at the blink of an eye. We luckily got a very generous gift from my parents to help towards the payment this time, without which, we would have had to wait a few months until we saved up. Regardless, it's a shit-ton of cash. I asked for a shot of Petron after they handed me my receipt today. The nurses laughed, but I was 100% serious.
So today it begins... we are scared, nervous, excited, hopeful, doubtful... and officially broke.
