National Infertility Awareness Week (Blogtavism)

To the powers that be:

My husband and I always follow the rules. We went to college and graduated with honors. We work and have worked in public education, public policy, and health care -- trying to give back to our community. We pay a ton of taxes! We saved and bought a house with plenty of space to raise the family we'd carefully planned for. When the time seemed right, we decided to start trying to conceive. Thus began the longest, most arduous and heart wrenching experience of my life.

We did what we were told . . . just relax and it will happen. Give it a while. Then it turned into monitor your temperatures,use a ovulation predictor. After six months, I knew there was a problem. Why else would two healthy people at healthy weights and with regular cycles not be able to conceive? Then, the testing began. I can't count the number of times we went to the doctor, the number of oh so pleasant exams, the horrible hysterosalpingogram, the ultrasounds, and the blood draws. Then, we each had surgery. The diagnosis: each of us had a medical condition that was preventing conception.

Our only option: in vitro fertilization with ICSI. Did I mention that I'm a lowly public servant? In Oklahoma, state employee insurance is like picking the best of the worst -- every option is bad! No coverage for any part of IVF. Do you have any idea how much one cycle of IVF costs? Or how much time is involved? (It's very difficult for a teacher to take off an hour or two every day for an extended period of time). Or what the likelihood of success is? We decided to take the risk -- to gamble most of what I make in a year on one attempt. We don't generally gamble, but we felt as if we had no choice.

Thankfully, our "gamble" paid off and we conceived our little boy on the first round. But about half of all couples who try IVF aren't so lucky the first time around. It's hard to even imagine how we would have felt had the outcome been different. We were fortunate that we could even attempt IVF once. It is sad that most health insurance only covers diagnosis and some treatment of infertility related issues (like cheap clomid or surgery, none of which would help us). Medical conditions (endometriosis and a varicocele) kept us from conceiving naturally, but our medical insurance would not help us. Our insurance company would probably have saved money if they'd just paid for IVF instead of multiple surgeries.

Infertility is a disease -- a disease that causes severe stress and can even cause loving couples to fall apart -- please help change state laws to mandate coverage for treatment that can actually help. Please mandate coverage for IUI and IVF.