Stephanie McKenzie's blog

With everything squared away to begin IVF, I set up an appointment
with my new fertility clinic to get the pre-testing they said I needed.

Knowing my IVF treatments were going to start soon, I decided it was a
good idea to get my body into the best shape possible for being pregnant
and sustaining a pregnancy.

An unnamed 38-year-old woman in New Jersey is divorcing her her
husband of 8 years. What separates this story from an otherwise common
tale, is that the woman is asking her husband for $20,000 in the divorce
settlement so she can freeze and store her eggs.

While waiting for my first IVF appointment, I decided to make room for
the new child. This was both a physical and a spiritual endeavor. I've
always read that if you want something, you should act as if it has
already come to you.

I never imagined how important my IVF fundraiser would be to my life
when I started it. I knew it was important for raising money to get the
IVF. However, it turned out to mean a lot more than that.

Going through the process of struggling to have a baby and then finally getting to the point where it looks like it's really going to happen is an emotional journey as well as a physical one.

With the fundraiser over and my $4,000 raised, I was able to pay
back my mother and wait for the fertility clinic to call to say the
study was starting. It was very exciting and I was eager to start.

My IVF fundraiser was going pretty well. I was promoting it once a
week on Facebook and I had several friends who were promoting it on
their own Facebook pages, too. One of my friends even acted as my
personal cheerleader.

Shortly after I set up my crowdsourcing fundraiser for IVF, I discovered a local fertility clinic was offering an amazing proposition to interested women.

Deciding to go the IVF route was undoubtedly the best way to go at this point. Paying for it was a whole other thing. Unfortunately, it isn't covered by most insurance policies and I haven't found a doctor or clinic yet who will do in with an in-house payment plan.

We had now been actively trying to get pregnant for nearly four years
and unofficially for seven years before that. Nothing we had tried so
far had worked. The acupuncture was the only thing that even produced a
noticeable physical difference.

Still trying to go the natural route, I started doing online research to find different ways to boost fertility. I generally keep Facebook open in its own tab on my computer throughout the day; I started getting a lot of adds for fertility products in my Facebook sidebar.

With no success with intrauterine insemination (IUI), ovulation tracking, and fertility acupuncture, I was kind of at a loss as to what to do next. IVF was the only option I knew that I hadn't tried, and it was a lot more expensive than I could afford at that time.

After a year of tracking ovulation with extreme precision and no results, I decided to try a different tactic. I've long been a fan of acupuncture. I got it once a week for two years straight to help me with relaxation in my mid-20s.

I'd been reading a lot about getting pregnant and was surprised to discover that there are actually only two to three days a month during which a woman can get pregnant. These days depend on your cycle.

After diagnosing us with unexplained infertility, our reproductive medicine doctor went over our options with us. The first two things she recommended were intrauterine insemination and in-vitro fertilization.

I was pretty excited to be going to the fertility specialist. I had every confidence the doctor would ask some questions, do some testing, and tell me how to fix whatever was wrong so I could get pregnant. My husband wasn't so excited.

I was always sure I wanted kids. I talked about it when I was a teenager as if it were a given that I would have them someday in the far off future. There was only a very brief time in my early 20's when I wasn't sure.