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Melody had an appointment with the IVF Study doctor a few days ago, and to cut a long story short (that Melody will be writing about soon), we didn’t qualify for the study. That means our hope of pursuing the cheap route to spawning is not going to happen for the time being.

The going rate for IVF was going to be around $6000, give or take a few nickels.

As Melody found out, the rates we’re looking at for the procedure outside of the clinical study are a little staggering.

First off, there’s two plans we can sign up for.

One is essentially a one-time process, where you basically get one run through the procedure of IVF. It’s called “Single Cycle.” It involves a lot of medications, several visits, ultrasounds, screenings, the works. Basically you get everything you need for a one-hitter of IVF to see if you can get a spawn from it.

Single Cycle runs about $11,000.  If it doesn’t work, and you want to go again, it’s another $11,000. The down payment on this option (due on the first day you start everything), is $5500. The rest is out of pocket expenses for medications and procedures as you go through the process and need to buy more things.

Oh yeah…here’s the point in the story that I say that from here on out, we have a 60% chance of conceiving through IVF.

So…that would be a 60% chance of $11,000 not working.

Option #2 is called the “Shared Success Program (SSP)”.

It’s obviously more likable from the outset, because it has the word sharing in it….right? Sounds a lot better than Single Cycle….so clinical…..so cold. Shared Success sounds like you get a life coach that’s going to say nice things all the way through, buy us dinner, clean the house, help Melody down the stairs if she gets pregnant while I’m at work.

Turns out there’s not a lot of sharing going on in the SSP. So…here’s a better name for it….

“Partial Warranty Against Failure Program (PWAFP). I pronounce it “Per-Waff-Puh.”

This program is the same as the single cycle, except you get a repeat procedures if the first doesn’t work.

The way it works, is that they freeze a bunch of embryos, and then basically they keep inserting them until they work, or until you have none left. It’s like an all you can eat buffet that you can keep going back to, as long as you have frozen embryos left. Wow…that’s a really weird vision of a medical Golden Corral restaurant i just had.

Anyway….moving on.

The cost of this one though, is around about $20,000. The down payment on this option is $15,500, due on the first day you start the process. If you go through the whole batch of embryos and still aren’t pregnant, you get a $7000 refund though.

That’s a lot of money.

That’s a Ford Fiesta, and enough to deck it out with spinners, and another car towed behind it almost.

So…..we have a decision to make….and it’s not an easy one.

Go with the cheaper option….and possibly get lucky, and therefore only have to tell the spawn that they have to start mowing lawns at age 10 to earn money for our family.

or…

Go with the cheaper option….possibly get unlucky (and seriously..we’re not really feeling lucky…have you read the rest of this blog?)…and then have to find another $11,000 to try again…or even another $20,000 so we get more attempts. Then we tell the spawn that they need to start mowing lawns at age 5, but that a mower is too heavy for them, so they have to use safety scissors instead.

or…

Go with the more expensive option…get lucky on the first try….and regret spending the extra $9000

or…

Go with the more expensive option, don’t get lucky…..and then get $7000 back to put towards a really nice vacation, or the start of a down payment on the next $20,000……but we’ve still had to come up with $15,000 as a starting amount, which will not be easy.

Either way…we don’t have too many shots at this, and that sucks. It sucks hard. We know that we can put together enough from different places, and do some shuffling around to find enough for either procedure, but if it doesn’t work, it will be a fair amount of time before we could try again if it doesn’t work.

And that’s hard to stomach. It really is.

We are hoping for the best, but as we’ve said before….all the well wishes in the world don’t really matter at the end of the day. We’re good people. We’re nice people. It hasn’t worked for us up to this point in time, and there’s no guarantee that it will work with either of these procedures.

The other thing gnawing at us a little, is that kind of money is almost enough to start thinking about adoption. That’s something Melody and I have talked about before, and it’s something we’re both interested in, but our obvious first choice is to have our own baby.

So it’s difficult to look at what could be 80% of the cost being spent on a 100% certainty (adoption) being spent on a 60% possibility (IVF). Adoptions run somewhere in the range of $20,000-25,000 depending on what country, background you’re looking to adopt from.

Anyway….Melody will, I’m sure, fill in more of the details from the meetings she’s had with the few doctors this week….but there it is. I’ve done my manly duties and put the hard numbers on the table.

So….spawn…..if you’re reading this in the future, there’s the numbers you need to start looking at when you’re considering summer jobs (notice the “s” on the end of “job”).

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