On the wrong side of the statistics

A year ago today, I wrote a tiny letter to our baby. We didn’t have a baby yet, but I knew we’d have one soon. We’d had all the tests, made all the decisions, we were ready. We had the might of science behind us, we had a savings account, we had each other. We knew that lots of people struggled to have children, but we were skipping over all the heterosexual guess-work and heading straight to fertility treatment. It was costing us thousands. It would work.

Our doctor drew up a plan. Two rounds of simple IUI, then two rounds of medicated. He told us that they would usually keep trying simple insemination for another few rounds, but he’d seen all our test results. My wife’s insides were perfect, our donor’s sperm was in the ‘green’ zone on every measure. Simple IUI should work, and if it didn’t within the first two times, it’d be an ovulation issue that would be cleared up within a medicated round or two. His confidence was contagious. We were a straightforward case! 

Last time I checked in, we’d established that that was not even a small amount true. We were not a straightforward case. We were onto our fourth round, and that round alone had thrown us all over the show. There were five follicles then there were two follicles but turns out there may as well have been none because the pregnancy test was negative.

So that was it. The end of the road for IUI. The thing that was supposed to work had not worked and now we had to do the Big Deal thing and we did not want to do that. All around us people were getting pregnant like it was an achievable thing and we were like… how are you doing that though. HOW. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN. YOU DIDN’T EVEN GET BLOOD TESTS TO GET THE TIMING RIGHT. HOW IN THE NAME OF ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING DID YOU PULL THAT OFF. All with a smile jammed on our faces like wow, great! So great! A baby! How lovely! … can I have it?

We looked at the calendar and Linda’s Clue app and realised that the IVF timing was going to be a clusterfuck. We had a holiday to Hawaii booked, then it was Christmas, and we wouldn’t be able to start anything until January. Unless… unless we snuck an extra round of IUI in. A precious, secret round, just for us. That seemed like the kind of thing that would work in movies, right? We take one last chance and it ends in a baby and we’re saved from the jaws of IVF just in time.

Yeah, it didn’t work. We got a good number of follicles, the timing was perfect, the test was negative. Five months, thousands and thousands of dollars, five negative pregnancy tests. We went to Hawaii and had cocktails almost every night and tried to enjoy being young and child-free. We kept trying to tell each other “it’s actually kind of good we’re not pregnant, because [silly little thing we’d give up in a heartbeat if it meant having a baby]!” 

When we got back, we had an appointment booked to talk to our doctor. For the first time, I couldn’t make the appointment, and Linda had to go alone. I sent her a list of questions to ask, and she recorded his answers on her phone. It’s all as non-committal and guess-work-y as you’d expect: we got the universally loathed diagnosis of unexplained infertility, and no ideas of what to do differently coming up to IVF. At one point, he told Linda that we just wound up on the wrong side of the statistics. Quite. The appointment cost us $180.

Three days later they sent us a cost estimate for our January cycle.

$15,465.

They followed up quickly with another email: we’re sorry, that quote was out by $750. Oh, phew! I didn’t think that could be r-.

$16,212.

Ah, I see. You’d under-estimated it by $750. Why does this $7 wine taste like tears? 

So that’s us! Our IUI days are officially behind us, and IVF lies in wait. We’ve drawn up a budget, thrown up in our mouths a little, re-acquainted ourselves with the concept of simple pleasures, and begun a Lost re-watch that should take care of our entertainment needs well into 2019. Let the summer of needles begin.