I'm not infertile, but I may as well be. My husband has a condition that would cause great harm to any children we may have, and therefore we have made the choice to use infertility treatments to avoid it. We are using donor sperm and in utero insemination.
We are now on our third cycle. Our insurance covers none of the fertility treatments, and we're already beginning to struggle. We are using the absolute cheapest form of fertility treatments available to us, and it still costs around $1500 every cycle. That may not sound like much, but in less than five months, we've spent nearly $5000 trying to get pregnant, unsuccesfully.
I feel like a failure. I look around, and I've lost count of how many women, friends, loved ones, and acquaintes have announced their pregnancies and brought babies into the world since I started lobbying to try for a baby, and now, when we are finally in a place to do that, I have failed. There was a polyp in my uterus, which acts like a natural IUD - it's almost impossible to get pregnant with that kind of obstruction. It was removed, painfully, but my doctor. Then, during the second cycle, the lining in my uterus was too thin, and there was no success there.
This evening, I will take a new medicine (the doctor believes that it's likely the Clomid, the fertility medicine I was on, might have caused the thinness of my uterine lining, so he changed the medicine) and try for the third time.
I have it easy. Many of my friends have had to do In vitro feritilization, which costs many times what my fertility treatments cost. Some of them have tried for years, not months, to get pregnant, and with no support from any insurance companies.
One of those friends found this video laying out the pain and struggle and calling for a change in the healthcare system, which provides medicine for free to men who want to get an erection, but won't support families struggling to have a child. The video is choppy, but emotional.
http://www.vimeo.com/11214833
A link to an article from Self Magazine:
http://www.self.com/health/2010/08/breaking-the-silence-on-infertility?currentPage=2
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