Wow! It’s Wednesday! Some Advice Before You Start Fertility Testing
The other month a friend asked me for advice re fertility testing, IUI, and IVF. Here’s what I told her below. If you, too, have been through fertility testing, IUI, or IVF, please feel free to add your two cents in the comments.
1. Cut back at work. I actually quit my job during the process, b/c basically you have to revolve around your ovulation cycle and show up to appointments at the drop of a dime sometimes. If people are counting on you to be certain places at certain times, you’re going to drive them and yourself crazy. So don’t quit your job, but if you can, do the bare minimum to keep your job and don’t take on any new projects.
2. Pick someone to vent to outside of your partner.
3. Make a worst-case scenario budget. For example we said that we would pay for any fertility tests that we needed. And would try IUI up to 5 times (we were advised to stop after two tries). And we agreed that we would only try IVF twice b/c it is so expensive. A lot of people don’t like to think about the worst-case scenario, but that’s how you end up divorced and broke. Agree beforehand how far you and your partner want to take this before you look into adoption or not having children at all. The process is very hard on marriages and much like with parenting, you want to be on the same page. The worst fights come when one partner wants to keep trying and the other is like, “No, we’ve spent too much money.” Have the fight BEFORE you start the process.
4. Have some hard discussions about finances. If IUI works, there’s a good chance that you’ll have multiples. Discuss what you want to do if it turns out that you’re pregnant with more than two babies. Also, discuss the fact that if you do get pregnant with multiples, you will be put on bed rest at some point during your pregnancy and won’t be able to work. Seriously, I can’t stress enough how important budgeting is beforehand.
5. Start doing Date Night now. Date Night is basically a date every other week where you don’t talk about infertility. The process is consuming and it’s easy to forget about your partner’s needs and wants. Date Night is a great way to touch base and remind yourselves why you wanted to spend the rest of your lives together in the first place. Also, Date Night helps to keep you both sane during the often long process of getting pregnant. And it sets a great precedent for parenthood, when your Date Night will be you two agreeing to go out and not talk about your child(ren).
Some wise advice, Ernessa. I did not start out with any financial planning and instead started the process with just a few tests, just a few more, just try this little intervention, just add this, on and on. The financial death of a thousand cuts. Or rather, 10,000 cuts, the first round. Another 70,000 cuts a few years later. Especially early on in the process, no one thing costs that much, but they add up to hundreds or even thousands per month.
My advice is to be prepared for anything. I fully expected that when I started testing, they'd find something fixable and we'd have an easy solution. When they didn't find anything, I expected that the initial interventions would work. Then I expected that bumping up the interventions would work. Oh, adding acupuncture will totally do the trick. First IVF has to work. And so on. I never, ever expected that once I got pregnant I would miscarry, nor that I would defy medical logic by failing so many interventions, nor that it would take me 7 years.
Most people have a quick and relatively simple road through infertility treatment. If they reach the status of "infertile," most people have to deal with more than they'd like, but it's frankly not really all that much. And then there are those of us who require huge levels of intervention over many years to achieve success. Those who get pregnant on a break between IVF cycles 4 and 5, or similar urban legends. And then there are those who try everything possible and never end up with a baby. The problem is that when you start, you have no idea which group you'll fall into. You have no idea how long it will take, how much it will cost, what it will do to your body and mind, whether it will even work in the end. My advice is to be prepared for that level of uncertainty.
Yes, I think about you often when giving advice and I've referred so many people to your blog saying, "She's my hero. She didn't give up."
It should be noted that the only reason we made a financial plan is b/c I read an article in Esquire about it on the flight back from my god son's baby shower. I was just about to go into fertility testing when I read the article. What was interesting is the male writer was all like, oh, all we did was argue and she was really stressed out. And there was this tiny little side bar with the wife's advice about how she wished they had done more financial and emotional planning and that was the most valuable piece of advice I got through my entire journey to baby. It also should be noted that we were limited to our savings, so in many ways our worst-case scenario plan was a "what you can afford" plan.
Still, I do wonder if we would have been able to stick to the plan if IVF didn't work within the allotted time we had given it. In many ways, you were more hopeful than me. I remember feeling after the first failed IUI that there was a desert in my womb and that nothing would work . I thought about all the literature we had been given about how IUI works for most patients, and I wondered why we weren't "most" patients, why we were the ones having to work so hard for children. I cried in my car. A lot. It was a terrible time, though relatively short if I compare myself to a few others in the IF community.
That's why I don't believe in blessings. I can't believe that any God would refuse one woman a child and grant another woman one, just because she is more blessed. It's true that you just never know what category you're going to fall into. I think it's just luck of the draw, and that's why your advice to be prepared for anything is very good.
Some wise advice, Ernessa. I did not start out with any financial planning and instead started the process with just a few tests, just a few more, just try this little intervention, just add this, on and on. The financial death of a thousand cuts. Or rather, 10,000 cuts, the first round. Another 70,000 cuts a few years later. Especially early on in the process, no one thing costs that much, but they add up to hundreds or even thousands per month.
My advice is to be prepared for anything. I fully expected that when I started testing, they'd find something fixable and we'd have an easy solution. When they didn't find anything, I expected that the initial interventions would work. Then I expected that bumping up the interventions would work. Oh, adding acupuncture will totally do the trick. First IVF has to work. And so on. I never, ever expected that once I got pregnant I would miscarry, nor that I would defy medical logic by failing so many interventions, nor that it would take me 7 years.
Most people have a quick and relatively simple road through infertility treatment. If they reach the status of "infertile," most people have to deal with more than they'd like, but it's frankly not really all that much. And then there are those of us who require huge levels of intervention over many years to achieve success. Those who get pregnant on a break between IVF cycles 4 and 5, or similar urban legends. And then there are those who try everything possible and never end up with a baby. The problem is that when you start, you have no idea which group you'll fall into. You have no idea how long it will take, how much it will cost, what it will do to your body and mind, whether it will even work in the end. My advice is to be prepared for that level of uncertainty.
Yes, I think about you often when giving advice and I've referred so many people to your blog saying, "She's my hero. She didn't give up."
It should be noted that the only reason we made a financial plan is b/c I read an article in Esquire about it on the flight back from my god son's baby shower. I was just about to go into fertility testing when I read the article. What was interesting is the male writer was all like, oh, all we did was argue and she was really stressed out. And there was this tiny little side bar with the wife's advice about how she wished they had done more financial and emotional planning and that was the most valuable piece of advice I got through my entire journey to baby. It also should be noted that we were limited to our savings, so in many ways our worst-case scenario plan was a "what you can afford" plan.
Still, I do wonder if we would have been able to stick to the plan if IVF didn't work within the allotted time we had given it. In many ways, you were more hopeful than me. I remember feeling after the first failed IUI that there was a desert in my womb and that nothing would work . I thought about all the literature we had been given about how IUI works for most patients, and I wondered why we weren't "most" patients, why we were the ones having to work so hard for children. I cried in my car. A lot. It was a terrible time, though relatively short if I compare myself to a few others in the IF community.
That's why I don't believe in blessings. I can't believe that any God would refuse one woman a child and grant another woman one, just because she is more blessed. It's true that you just never know what category you're going to fall into. I think it's just luck of the draw, and that's why your advice to be prepared for anything is very good.