Hoping For Babby

The Backstory

When you're doing fertility treatments, you have to get blood drawn - - a lot. And at my doctor's office there was a poster that said "Hoping for baby?" It was a flyer for a support group and it was right across from the bloodwork chair. So I stared at each time and it started to remind me of the meme from Yahoo Questions "how is babby formed?" I combined the two into what you see here.

Neither my girlfriend or I ever thought we'd be interested in being parents. But then the late 20's set in and both of our biological clocks started ticking. Considering neither of us make sperm, this turned out to be a problem.

It wasn't an option for us to just ask a male friend to help us out and adoption wasn't really an alternative either in our situation. So we figured if we're going to start a family, we would have to go the artificial insemination route. I wanted to carry the baby and she didn't, so it worked out perfectly.

We did some research and picked a doctor. She is the best in our area. We went to her clinic's fertility seminar and signed up for a 2-cycle IUI package with Clomid. The cheapest route, obviously, and we didn't think there would be any problems. I'm basically healthy and my family doesn't have any fertility issues that we know of. But there were problems.

My eggs didn't respond to Clomid well so we switched to an injections. We inseminated and nothing happened. For the second cycle we started with stronger injections from the beginning and it looked promising. But still nothing.

By this time we were getting desperate and poor. The third cycle might not have happened at all if it wasn't for my mom footing most of the bill. But it didn't work either.

We were heartbroken and not sure what we wanted to do next. I knew whatever we decided I wanted to wait. I was emotionally wrecked from the hormones, the disappointment and the stress. Christmas was coming up and I didn't want to ruin my favorite holiday either. We took those months to really assess our situation. The doctor suggested that it might not be wise sinking any more money into IUI and we agreed. But we had no idea how we would pay for IVF.

We're both teachers, so we are by no stretch of the imagination rich. We both come from middle-class families too, so no hidden trust funds or anything like that either. So after Christmas we started exploring our loan options. We thought we might apply for a home equity loan, but it turns out we had no equity so that was out.

But what we did have was a very helpful loan officer that helped us get the money together for a 3-cycle IVF package. We went forward only to be stopped again by my defective uterus after two failed transfers.

So the next step was to try a new uterus and luckily we happened to have another one handy and it worked much better than mine did. Now we've got not one, but two babies on the way and this story just keeps getting more and more interesting.

Financial Ticker (amounts are approximate)

Please don't misinterpret the financial tracker above. We're not bragging about how much we have spent, because as you probably read above we are in debt now. And we're not begging for money either. Even with the loans, we're still able to pay our bills and all that. This is just to show the reality of just how much you could be getting in for if you go this route as well. And it was also for our own curiosity as well.

Something I found out that I wish I knew about before all of this is that there are actually grants available for fertility treatments! Below is a list of links to as many of these grants I could find. And most of them start taking applications at the beginning of the year so this is the best time to check them out. I'll be applying for the ones I qualify for just in case these next 3 IVF rounds don't work because I'm pretty sure a bank might hesitate to give us more money soon. Most of the grants have restrictions like where you live or the doctor you choose but there are probably a few that you qualify for and it's worth a shot.

Hoping For Babby

About Me

Wednesday, May 9, 2012

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