Help Me, IVF Kenobi

General IVF,

Months ago I began my fight in the Fertility Wars. Now I beg you to help me in the struggle against the Medical Régime. I regret that I am unable to continue this conflict on my own, but my transport system is ineffective, and I’m afraid my mission to continue naturally has failed. I have placed information vital to the survival of my procreation into the memory systems of this GFM unit. You need only scroll to retrieve it. You must see this information delivered safely across the galaxy. This is my most desperate hour.

Help me, IVF Kenobi. You’re my only hope.

 

 

 

 

 

To friends, family, acquaintances, and strangers,

Now that you’ve unencrypted that message let me give you a little background. My name is Kristin and I am trying to start my own family, but I now need help to do it. I have been described as “textbook PCOS” by my doctor. I suspected this for a while and once I began my TTC journey the evidence I was receiving further solidified those suspicions. What that means is that my hormones aren’t properly functioning and I don’t ovulate like I should. No ovulation means no egg; no egg means no baby.

 

So, why am I asking for help? Without medical intervention I don’t have much chance of achieving pregnancy. Even in months when my body produces a viable egg, it’s doing it a week later than it should, which makes the back-end of my cycle too short to support pregnancy. I don't have infertility coverage (very few states or agencies offer this in the US), but have paid out-of-pocket already for a couple of rounds of bloodwork and an HSG test to make sure everything is physically viable.

To know more about what I’m asking for and why, please look further down on the GoFundMe page for my reasoning.

 

So if you donate, thank you so much. If you donate alone, my sincerest gratitude. If you pool together five dollars each from your gaming group, I love you, careful of the mimic. Gathering $10 from coworkers, thank you and I hope you get to wear comfortable shoes. I realize that from an outside perspective I’m just asking for money, but what it directly translates to is my ability to have children.

 

You’re probably asking “Why you? What makes you so worthy?”

 

While I don’t have Mjolnir to prove myself to you, I have:

*A college education with additional child development classes

*A tight-knit family including extended relatives and a solid support system

*An undying love for the Lord of the Rings

*A very sarcastic sense of humor

*I love food so spicy you cried yesterday

*I always use my turn signals

*I can say my ABCs backwards

and in the end…there is nothing that I want more in life than to have children. There’s nothing I can say that can truly convince you, so all I really have to say is “please”. You’re my only hope.

 

 

 

 

Why $20,000? The short answer is “prospective pessimism”. The long answer is a whole breakdown of math, so let me summarize.

 

A normal person with no hormonal imbalances has about a 20% chance of conceiving a baby in any given month. With PCOS this number can dramatically decrease. There’s no clear set of statistics that I can find, mainly because women with PCOS can have such a varied array of symptom severity. There are medications to help women ovulate, but the pregnancy rates are all over the place. One fertility clinic sets their rate of pregnancy with Clomid at 15% after 4 months, another has their success rate at 11.5%. Another entirely gives no top range, just adds about 3-5% to whatever your initial chances are to begin with. So even after 4 months there is still less of a chance than a normal woman in one month. If cycles of the lower-end of ovulation medication fail, you look at moving into far more expensive injection medication, which can run several hundred to a thousand dollars every cycle and requires sonogram monitoring.

 

Without going into a process-by-process breakdown, the average cost of IVF in the United States is $15,000. This is where my $20k comes in, setting $5,000 aside for the testing protocols and $15k for actual IVF.

 

But how exactly does this breakdown? Well, let me tell you, because $20k is a lot, right? We can split this number up.

 

It takes:

 

 

While I regret having to do this, IVF is my only substantial chance at children. So from one scruffy-looking nerf herder to another, please give what you can and may the Force be with you.