Help Greg & Nic start a family
It feels like everyone knows our story, but for those who may be new here we’ll start at the beginning.
Our first date started like any other: a meet-up for cocktails at a bar. Within a few hours we were sharing our life stories and medical history. We were both chronic-sickies, Greg with severe gut issues, Nic with everything. Hashimotos, PCOS and a degenerative neuro disease to boot. Both empathetic and oversharers, it was a clearly a perfect match.
Things moved pretty quickly and we knew early on we wanted a family together. Nic has been a career nanny for the better half of 15 years, specializing in postpartum and newborn care... she’s a professional baby whisperer if you will. Greg is just the kind of guy that actually grew up dreaming of kids and a wife. When he found out Nic was an auntie to two very little kids, he immediately got emotional knowing that someday he would be “Uncle Greg.” We booked and planned our wedding before we were engaged and started trying to start a family of our own a month after our engagement. Due to Nic’s medical history, we knew it might be tricky... little did we know!
Fast forward another year and Covid happened to everyone; canceling our wedding plans, losing thousands of dollars and causing unprecedented stress in all of our lives. We had a Facetime wedding with our parents and a week later met with our reproductive specialist Dr. Barbieri of ORMFertility.
By July Nic started all the testing, hormones and procedural screenings. To date it’s been:
19 ultrasounds
4 specialty ultrasounds
2 MRIs
12 blood panels
genetic screening
10 bottles of hormones
5 trigger injections
2 cycles of injectables
Probably 100 acupuncturist appointments
A million homeopathic treatments
A bazillion hours of fertility yoga
And thousands upon thousands of dollars on top of what we already pay for our “great” health insurance.
So far out of it we got: 1 miscarriage, 20lbs of hormonal and emotional eating weight gain for Nic and Greg continuously feeling helpless because thanks to Covid... Nic has to attend every appointment and procedure alone.
In February we officially were told we had come to the stage in our journey where Frozen Embryo IVF with ICSY (literally all the science) was our only option left. In Oregon and in many states in the U.S., infertility is not covered by insurance so we’ve been paying for all medications and procedures out of pocket. (One single injection is over $600. Like what? Why?) What most people make for free, is going to cost us about $40k more and has only a 56% success rate. Due to Nic’s further spine degeneration and high-risk pregnancy factors we were suggested to get started on IVF within three months of our March cycle.
In order to even start this process we need to put $20,000 down. Nic has been working her career nanny job (with a third baby on the way) + doing photography full-time and has saved just about half of our deposit over the last two months, but with biological time constraints and Covid not going anywhere and putting a damper on photography bookings, we have gotten to the point where we are asking for help. We would do just about anything to make our dreams of becoming parents to our own little human a reality. Our motto through this process has been “we just want one good healthy one.” Any assistance we can get to get closer to our “one” would be incredible and our gratitude, immeasurable.
**for those of you who don’t like using GFM due to the % they take. We set up Nics Venmo to deposit into our medical spending acct @Nicole-Pelott