Falling Into Place

It was around March of 2011 that we were given the diagnosis of male factor infertility. I was feeling hopeless and depressed about the whole situation. In early April, I was doing a little blog stalking, when I stumbled across a friend from high school's blog. Sure enough, like everyone else I knew at the time (or so I felt anyway), she was pregnant. This was different though, the more I read on the more excited I actually got. They had just completed three cycles of IVF and their third was not only successful, but they were having twins! In one short blog post I was given everything I needed again, hope. It was just a glimmer but it was enough to wake me up and realize that we could have the same results someday. I immediately found this friend on facebook and messaged her with a few questions about their process. She was so willing to help me out as much as she could and just watered my little seed of hope. They had their IVF services at the Idaho Center for Reproductive Medicine which also had sister locations in Utah and Nevada. My friend could not say enough wonderful things about Dr. Foulk and their experience with his office. We were currently living in Utah so I began looking into services and those locations. Financially it seemed like a long shot but my hope was still there. James and I discussed options of taking out loans, borrowing from family, and other ways to save but after being told that it could cost $20-30,000 it still seemed out of reach.
James decided that our best option was for both of us to work for a year and save as much as we could. We moved in with family to cut back on rent while James finished his undergrad and then after he graduated we moved to Idaho to live with my mom. James took a year off from school while he applied to medical schools and worked at the hospital doing registration. I transferred to a salon at the mall and did my best to build a clientele as quickly as possible. It was around this time that I finally asked my friend how they paid for their cycles. Which I strongly, strongly dislike asking people financial questions, so this wasn't an easy thing for me to do. Her response blew my mind though, insurance! Some of you may be more health savvy than I am, but I had been told by everyone that fertility services were not covered by insurance, so I was shocked!
Now I know that only 15 states require insurance companies to cover infertility services, including IVF. Idaho is not one of those states though. I was under 26 at the time and thanks to ObamaCare (they did at least one thing right) I was covered under my dad's insurance. Though my dad works in Idaho, his company is based out of California, which means so was their insurance. It felt like things were finally falling into place.
After confirming with my insurance that we were covered, I quickly did a check to see if they covered Dr. Foulk, and they did! I couldn't dial the number fast enough to set up our consultation. It turned out that Dr. Foulk was not seeing new patients at the Idaho location so I was slightly disappointed when we were scheduled with Dr. Slater. Our disappointment was immediately alleviated after meeting her though.
When we scheduled the consultation, I thought we would go in, discuss IVF in general, leave and then later decide what we were going to do. I was very wrong. We went in they told us about the whole process, gave us a calendar, did blood work and an ultrasound and we were ready to go! This may not be how every office works, but I was so happy they were as excited as we were to get the ball rolling. We were perfect candidates, we had male factor infertility, we were young and healthy, I had plenty of eggs left, and we were one small step closer to becoming a mommy and daddy.