Two days after I faxed in my Compassionate Care forms, I got a call from the fertility clinic saying I'd been approved for a 75 percent discount on Gonal-F and Cetrotide. It wasn't the 100 percent discount I was hoping for, but it was the next best thing. Instead of paying around $2,500 for those medications, I'd only pay about $700.

I could get the antibiotic and the prednisone for free off of my regular insurance. At first, I thought it would only be the antibiotic, but after finding out the 10 tablets of Medrol they wanted to put me on was actually prednisone, I knew that was covered with no co-pay on my insurance. So that was two medications I would get for free.

As far as the Valium they wanted me to take on the day of the egg retrieval, I wasn't even sure if I would need it. I had already been prescribed tranquilizers for anxiety (as three generations of women in my family before me had been....a genealogical and health-based DNA test recently revealed that it was, as we all suspected, hereditary). Maybe my regular tranquilizer would do. If not, it was just one pill of Valium and couldn't be that much money to purchase.

That just left the Endometrium and the Menopur. Fortunately, the Endometrin wasn't very expensive. Plus, I found a discount card only where I could get $100 off its total cost, bringing the price to around $239. Not bad.

The Menopur was going to be the issue. The 33 vials of it I needed cost $2,375 from the pharmacy my fertility clinic had me set up to use. However, I found a pharmacy in the UK where I could get it for $500 less. Plus, I found a discount card for the Menopur online, too. It just didn't say how much the discount would be. So my next thing to do in pricing this all out would be to apply for the card and see if the discount was substantial enough to bother using it.

All total, I was looking at paying between $1,800 and $2,300 for all of my medications, depending on where I got the Menopur. That wasn't even counting the anesthesia for egg retrieval and the assisted hatching. I was probably going to need about $4,000 more dollars to do this.