Please Help Us On Our IVF Journey

Hi, our names are Steven and Katie Wilwerding. We have been on our journey to have a child for 4 years. Our story is a long one, I first got pregnant in 2017. It was unexpected but completely welcomed. I did not find out until I was having pain in my right side. It finally got so severe I had no option but to go to the ER, I was told it was an ectopic pregnancy and my right fallopian tube had burst. If I had waited any longer I would've ran the risk of dying. After surgery, we waited about a year and decided to try again. However with one fallopian tube it made it pretty difficult. After finding an amazing Dr, I was placed on fertility medication and i became pregnant in two rounds of it. We were absolutely thrilled! Everything looked good, every blood draw my levels were rising. However our joy would be pretty short lived, I started getting pain in my left side, and I knew immediately something was very wrong. Thank goodness I had an amazing Dr that would go above and beyond to ease my mind. After an ultrasound it was determined that I had another ectopic pregnancy but located in my left tube. I pleaded to save my tube, but in the end. It couldn't be salvaged. We were left heart broken. We waited until after our wedding to look into IVF.

After alot of research we found the amazing Dr. Silber. He is located in St. Louis, MO. But he is one of the best and so is his entire team. We decided to ask our families for a loan to cover our journey. In the end our first round (including retrieval, meds, hotel stay, transfer and more hotel stays) it cost about $20,000. But our families were more than willing to help us.

Retrieval went amazing and we were left with 5 beautiful embryos. All graded well. For our first transfer we went with 2 embryos, and to our surprise it worked!! We were over the moon!! However the all too familiar pain came back...we were devastated. It once again was an ectopic. Somehow our embryo had found the only part of a fallopian tube left and implanted there.

After healing and paying back our families as much as we could...we were ready to try again. We had to borrow the money we had already paid back to our families.

We transfered two embryos again, but to our dismay (even though everything looked great). It did not work.

My age is a factor and with one embryo left...we are unable to fund another retrieval. We need to do another retrieval to up our odds of making our dream come true. We would be so grateful for this, we've wanted to add to our family for so long. But at this moment, this is our only option.

Thank you so much, any help is appreciated,

Katie and Steven