IVF Prices

When I spoke with the ivf nurse last Monday, she said she'd have the financial lady call me. She never did so I called her this morning. The good news is that the price for ivf hasn't gone up - $8,200; I was pleasantly surprised as I figured in 2 years it would have gone up. Our insurance will pay for about $2,200 of that so our cost after getting the refunds would be about $6,000. The bad news is that the other fees that aren't included in the package went up. ICSI (which we definitely need due to Paul's morphology issues) went from $550 to $650, assisted hatching (which we had for the frozen transfer but not the fresh transfer and I think we should use for a fresh transfer this time) went from $250 to $400, and freezing embryos went from $600 to $1,000. If we used ICSI and AH that would put our cost at $7,050. The perfect scenario in my mind would be that we had 3 embryos make it to blastocyst and we had those transferred (fresh) without any being frozen and had a pregnancy result from that fresh transfer, but obviously it was very wonderful that we had a frozen embie this last time since Nadia was that frozen blastocyst! So if we end up freezing an embryo then probably we wouldn't get any refunds. The total cost would likely be very close to the $8,200 we need to pay by March 12th.

The scariest part is the thought that we spend all that and it results in no pregnancies from fresh or frozen transfers. That's a definite possibility, but even knowing that I want to proceed as I feel we'll have regrets later on if we don't. I wish there was a shared risk option, but this clinic doesn't have those and even if they did I probably wouldn't qualify as usually 35 is the oldest you can be to qualify for one of those, and I'll be 37 by the time we get to a retrieval. It will be a really tough call at that point whether to try ivf a third time or switch back to trying to adopt (if we don't get pg from any fresh or frozen transfers from ivf #2). We have to resume our contract with Cathy by 12/14/09, or we're out the $4,900 we paid her in June 2007. If we resume our contract with her then we need to create new profiles and do our fourth homestudy. Ugh. I am hoping and praying ivf #2 results in a sticky bfp. That will make the decision easy!!!

I am still on a high about losing 5 lbs in 7 days! It will help keep my resolve strong. This weekend on one occasion I was eating carrots while Paul was eating Doritos and on another I was eating green beans while he was eating pizza. Pizza and Doritos would have been tastier, but I am very glad I chose to eat veggies instead!