up and down

After the slow start, my estrogen rose appropriately — “definitely conservative”, as one of my doctors described it (and it isn’t often that I’m described as conservative), but still, it was going in the right direction. Until today, when it came back at fivehundredsomething, after over 700 on Sunday (as I mentioned, conservative). Sigh. After the ultrasound, which showed a small group of follicles at the right size and a larger group that are a tad behind, the plan was to wait for the estrogen level, and trigger if it’s high enough, or continue for another day otherwise. Well, now that it went down we’re going to trigger anyway, and hope that the levels will go up tomorrow. As the follies were still around this morning, it’s unlikely that I already ovulated.

Yesterday I felt unwell and exhausted for a while, but then suddenly got better, and I’m wondering if that has anything to do with the drop. Fortunately the only symptom I have, occasional pinching and a feeling of pressure in the ovaries, came back this afternoon, which I hope is good news.

The part that stresses me out the most is that we did end up getting a pre-paid IVF+FET package — and after ER, there is no way to cancel any more. So I’m worried that we go into retrieval and then there’s nothing to retrieve… and we’d still have lost all our IVF funds. If my levels don’t go back up, my clinic would do an ultrasound just before ER to make sure there are follicles around. Until then, I’ll try to take it one breadth at a time.

it’s a rich man’s world

Our insurance has officially denied coverage for IVF. While this doesn’t come as a surprise, it still sucks. I grew up with socialized health care, and basically everyone from there is flabbergasted when I tell them about how much even trying is going to cost us (Ginger and Lime had some good posts about this recently).

Due to some lucky circumstances, we’ll be able to afford trying anyway — once. And maybe a FET, should we have anything to freeze. If neither of those works out, it’ll be a long time until we can try again. I’d like to think positive and hope we won’t get to that point, but sometimes it is hard to shake that nagging feeling of what if. I already feel incapable for not being able to get pregnant the way so many other people do. I’ll feel even more incapable for not being able to afford the treatment it would take, even though rationally that probably has less to do with my capabilities and more with the unfairness of not recognizing infertility as a disease that deserves insurance-covered treatment, the salaries paid to scientists, the crazy rents in this amazing city, etc. To cut my long ramblings short, we’re looking into the ARC packages with a money-back option. If you have any experiences with this, or any other ideas on how to finance IVF and/or how to spend tons of money on something that, more often than not, doesn’t work out and not feel bad about it, I’d love to hear them.