My Infertility Journey: Alternatives

Obie Editorial Team

It seemed like I was on the road to IVF, and I was eager to do it. However, the sudden declaration that I would have to pay thousands of dollars in medications that weren't covered by the package price I paid and the tight timeframe they were giving me to get the medications was putting me under a lot of pressure. I didn't have a huge stockpile of financial resources (yet) upon which to draw and I'd exhausted nearly all of the ones I did have just to get to this point.

If I was going to do IVF in January, I was going to need help from my mother again, and her ability to help would depend on if her long-term care insurance ever decided it was going to pay for my step-dad to stay in assisted living and send her a refund check for what she'd already paid out of pocket. It was a lot of pressure, and I couldn't help but wonder if the universe was telling me to chill out and look at alternatives.

It had seemed that IVF was the best way to get pregnant at this point, but maybe I hadn't looked into things as fully as I thought I did. After all, we only tried intrauterine insemination once. They say there's a 10 percent chance of it working the first time. If we did it a full 10 times, there may be a good chance of us getting pregnant. This was especially true since I'd had the uterine polyps removed. In fact, my mother said maybe the whole reason I started on the IVF journey was so the polyps could be discovered and removed so they would no longer hinder pregnancy.

Combined with some more fertility acupuncture, I could really boost my chances of conceiving. This was definitely something worth considering, and with the polyps removed and me being more relaxed with the financial pressure gone, I knew it stood a good chance of working.