Since I was a child, I knew one thing about my future: I wanted to have kids. My career and lifestyle goals may have changed, but that never has. When I met TJ, I knew he was the person I wanted to spend my life with and that he would make an excellent dad, but we needed to wait until we were more stable and financially responsible. As soon as I got my first job as a nurse we "pulled the goalie" and started trying. That was in February of 2021, and we haven't had any luck since then. We started talking to our doctor within about six months, got some blood and other analyses done, and everything looked normal at first glance. The only number slightly out of whack was my AMH, which tells us about how many years of childbearing a woman has left, but it wasn't so low we should be concerned, so we kept trying.

After twelve months we started asking the tough questions, and I got another round of bloodwork done. This time my AMH had dropped by almost half, which is startling and an indication that I could go through early menopause. Not too surprising, considering my mom started menopause around 40 and my oldest sister started menopause at 30! Our OB recommended a fertility consult and bypassed some regular tests to get us in the office quicker.

Naturally, I was nervous going into the fertility office, but I thought I knew what our options were and how we would be able to proceed. Surely I had at least ten years of childbearing left, and we would be able to move forward with something like IUI. That is not what the specialist told us. After listening to our history and going through our charts, she looked at me and said: "If you were my sister, I would tell you to do IVF as soon as possible."

We were floored. It had never occurred to me that I wouldn't be able to conceive naturally, or at least with some minimal help. The doctor went on to tell us that with how quickly my AMH was dropping, if we had a child naturally it would most likely run out the clock on my body and we wouldn't be able to have more. She said our odds of conceiving naturally were about 5%, and IUI would only increase it to 10%. We agreed to start the preliminary testing while we weighed our options, which included an immediate pelvic ultrasound. She checked my follicles (which are the things that turn into eggs) and had more bad news for us. Most women she would expect to see around ten follicles on each ovary (so twenty total). On me she saw five total. This means even if IVF is successful, our odds of having multiple embryos at the end of the process (and thus multiple kids) is low.

We went home after that appointment to talk about our options. Neither of us was interested in IVF initially, but ultimately we came to the conclusion that we would regret it if we didn't try, so we're going to try.

Here's the next kick in the pants: IVF isn't covered by our insurance and can run around $15,000 per cycle. So here we are. There are grants available, which we are applying for, but most likely they won't cover all the costs.

IVF entails:

a couple of weeks of birth control pills

4-8 weeks of daily and twice daily injections

surgically removing any eggs that mature (under sedation)

fertilizing them in a lab and seeing how they grow

possibly some genetic/chromosome testing of the embryos

reimplanting them into my uterus

storing any fertilized embryos left over for later

Any contributions are appreciated and will come with updates on the process and tons of baby pics (not to mention babysitting rights) if we're successful!