How does IVF go, all of the details please? 💕

Question

Hey ladies so my partner and I suffer from severe male factor infertility and we are now moving on to IVF, I am wondering what the process will be step by step? and how long to expect this to take? also what the prices will be? I have gateway health Insurance so I’m sure they won’t cover much but what are the ideal prices and do I pay in increments or how does this go? Thank you in advance ❤️ we are feeling a little down since we got the news we can’t conceive naturally but understand this is apart of our journey

Answer

Agreed with Kait, it can really vary. We started last December and had a “duo-stim” egg retrieval which is basically two egg retrievals back to back to take advantage of being on the meds already and harvest more eggs for “low responders” a nice term 🙃. Anyhow because of immune and inflammation issues I wasn’t a candidate for a fresh transfer so we waited 5 days to see how many of our embryos made it to a blast stage to test and/or freeze. We had three and opted to genetically test them. Two were genetically normal and we froze them- those results took two weeks. Then my clinic had me do a sonogram with oil to check for irregularities on the surface of the uterus to make sure it was clear for a pregnancy- they found a polyp so I had to have a small surgery to have the removed. Then they had us prep for transfer for 30 days on birth control and then the actual transfer meds - about 17 days, then we had our first FET in May. This ended in a chemical pregnancy, since we only had one embryo left our doctor wanted to do and ERA to test if he was giving me the right number of hours of progesterone before the transfer. Because of COVID and bad luck we had to repeat this process three times in July/Aug/September - knowing what I know now, I would have opted not to do this part… finally we had another sono with oil to check the uterus again and we’re cleared for another transfer. This one was a pretty intense autoimmune protocol so I won’t go into it here, we transferred on 11/30. We are currently 7w5d pregnant and we have an ultrasound tomorrow to make sure things are still growing OK. We were completely self pay in 2022 and we spent about $40k out of pocket on IVF costs including the charges from our clinic, meds, hospital charges, supplements, blood draws and ultrasounds. Our clinic is 6 hours away(we live in a very rural and remote part  of CO) so I think this cost would have been a bit lower if we were closer to our clinic and could do all procedures with them. It was still more $$ than I anticipated - I think we’d have still spent $25k or so. That was a book, but hopefully helpful! Good luck to you and if there is ever anything we can answer or help you understand we’re here! Rooting for you!

Answer

Everyone is different based on your protocol, frozen vs fresh transfer, etc. I had 10 days of birth control, 16 days of hormone injections, followed by egg retrieval procedure, 5 days later the transfer. Mine was a fresh transfer. Good luck. It's so hard but you can do it. It's so worth it. I'm currently 7 weeks and I started the process on Halloween. Can't comment on cost, my insurance paid for it.

Answer

Our insurance paid half but not for everything. With insurance paying half, we equaled out to around $9,000 with meds included just for the retrieval. We had to make sure that was paid before treatment. It is NOT cheap so prepare ahead. 
For protocol, everyone is different. I have a high egg reserve and my dr thinks I’ll be very reactive to stims so I started off with 11 days of birth control, 3 days later I start stims and my possible retrieval will be 1/25. It just depends on the progress of my follicles. We are waiting till fall for the transfer so it will be frozen for us. Hope this helps!

How does IVF go, all of the details please? 💕

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