IVF Preparation

We wanted to give everyone who has been following our journey an update on what we have been up to. The past few months have been hard on us emotionally. When we were told that the IVF was unsuccessful, I wanted to try again immediately. It was hard having our doctor tell us we had to do at least three months of additional treatments before trying again. However, it ended up being a really good thing having a few months off for us to deal with our loss and get ready physically and emotionally for another IVF cycle. We finally feel like we are in a good place and ready to try again.

Our fertility center recently published an awesome video on facebook of our doctor explaining what endometriosis is and how it affects fertility. Here is the video if you are interested in watching.

We will go through pretty much the same procedure as before; I will start out by giving myself shots daily to stimulate my egg production. Since my numbers were low last time they are upping the amount of medication so hopefully we will see an increase in healthy eggs. During this time I will have an appointment almost every day for an ultrasound and blood draw so they can make sure all is going well. When the eggs are ready, they will trigger ovulation and I will go in for a minor surgery in which they will retrieve all the eggs I have produced. The lab will fertilize the eggs and watch them for a few days to see how they develop. The embryos need to develop to a certain point before they can be used in a live transfer or frozen for future cycles. This time they will be adding a procedure called ICSI to increase the number of eggs fertilized. They will take the best two embryos and transfer them back for implantation. Any other embryos that have progressed to a certain point will be frozen. Then we wait and see if they have implanted.

 Unfortunately, like before, all that our insurance will cover is the blood work since infertility treatment is seen as non-essential treatment and IVF is very expensive:

Medicine/shots: $4,600
Base Cycle Fee: $8,300
ICSI: $1,500
Embryo preservation: $750

Based on feedback from some of our friends and family, we've decided to put together another fundraiser in case anyone wants to help. As a quick note, we've learned that since Youcaring uses Paypal to transfer money, Paypal takes 3% of donations through Youcaring. If you want to donate but wish to avoid this annoyance, we have alternate options. Using the square cash app you can send money directly and its free. You can find us under the username $carolynhalejohnson or $ussjohnson. You can also use the Venmo app using the username carolynhalejohnson. Any donations given to us offline will be manually entered and shown on the website as progress towards our goal.
Thank you so much for your help. We would not have been able to pay for either cycle with out the selfless donations of so many wonderful people.

Click here for our fundraiser