First comes love, then comes marriage, then come the baby...oh wait, no...no it doesn't...

Ok, I am on my new serious kick to blog daily or close to it. I am so young, but really have experienced so much during this TTC journey. If I can touch just one person with my blog, then the plan God has for me is serving its purpose (as painful and financially draining as this “journey” is). So let’s do the catch up.

Our last IUI failed. We had SOO much hope that it had worked…but alas…it didn’t. I was rather devastated this time around because we had 3 follies and awesome counts (well awesome by male factor standards). I did have an inkling that it didn’t take though.

After this failed round, DH went in to have his counts and everything looked at. My RE called and suggested that given his counts and my PCOS, we skip the 3rd try with injects and move on to IVF. In all honesty, I don’t know why people that have multiple factors (PCOS and male factor) aren’t just encourage to save their money and start with IVF. It’s a business I guess…and they milked us for 3K each inject/IUI cycle….but I have not known one cyster with male factor to get pregnant this way.

So Randy and I went to our IVF class (that is required by our fertility center). $216 later, I am scared out of my mind. I don’t think I realized quite how many needles I’d be sticking in myself or that the progesterone in oil needle is an 22g and it goes in your butt.

Our RE has recommended doing the long IVF protocol (Lupron and the works) and ICSI. They went ahead and ordered all of our meds. We actually faired pretty well. The clinic told us to anticipate close to a $3000 medication bill. It only came out to be $1587. It arrived at my husbands’ job today. I don’t think I realized going into this quite how expensive this whole thing is. Here’s the breakdown for our IVF procedure:

• Nashville Fertility Center 3000.00
• Reproductive Specialty Lab 3500.00
• NFC Surgery Center 2300.00
• Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection (ICSI) 1450.00
• Lupron 2 week kit 99.00
• Follistim 300 (7 cartridges) 1240.00
• Tetracycline 10.00
• Medrol dose pack 15.00
• Ovidrel Hcg shots (2) 179.98
• Progesterone in Olive Oil (2) 15.00
• Package of 22g needles 12.00
• Package of 18g needles 12.00
• Syringes 5.00
o GRAND TOTAL: $11,837

Damn it makes me cringe to type that out….but I guess everyone going into it needs to know. DH and I have ZERO insurance coverage for the procedure or meds. The only things that were covered were the antibiotics, steroids, and progesterone in oil.

Because I had a massive allergic reaction to progesterone suppositories (I had a Steven’s Johnsons reaction) that put me in the hospital, they want me to test taking the progesterone in oil shot one time tomorrow night to ensure that I don’t have an anaphylactic reaction to it. Since DH and I took the past two cycles off to prepare for IVF, we agreed that testing it before dumping thousands of dollars into the cycle would be a really good idea. The idea of plunging an entire 22g needle into my ass makes me cringe. The more I watch the “how to video” the more nervous I get. DH is going to give it to me just because of the location (and because I am a total chicken).

Well here’s goes nothing! I’ll keep you posted; )