What Nobody Tells You Before Starting IVF: My Fertility Journey

I am thrilled to say that after a year and a half of trying, I am pregnant! Michael and I are very open when discussing that we did not have a traditional pregnancy journey. We regularly see that people treat the idea of fertility as a taboo topic, and we want to break that stigma and normalize IVF and other non-traditional fertility methods. According to studies, about 17.5% of the adult population experiences infertility in their lifetime, which is 1 in 6 people, and 10–13% of women in the US under 49 have difficulty getting or staying pregnant. That means that it is not uncommon for people to have trouble conceiving, so why do we treat it like it’s so taboo? Is it because not being able to get pregnant makes us feel as if we are failures with our body’s relatively basic functions? I’m not sure. But it’s common, and I’m not afraid to talk about my journey so that other people can benefit from the struggles that Michael and I went through. Bear with me, as this may be long, but I want to cover everything I can think of, and I want to start by giving the crucial advice that I think people really need to know before they hop into this journey.

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What I wish I knew before starting IVF

There are a few VERY important things that I wish someone had told me before beginning my fertility journey.

You have to be your own advocate.

The people who are working in these fertility facilities deal with these scans, screenings, and procedures every single day. It is normal to them. Many of them fall into the habit of assuming you will know what is happening about the process every step of the way because they do. It’s not a bad thing on their part, they work around this every day and you don’t. If you are reading this, the process is mostly unfamiliar to you. Don’t fall into the trap of just going along with it. Stop someone any time you need to. Ask them to go back whenever you want. Ask questions. Ask detailed questions. It’s hard to know what to ask, but try to ask anything you can think of about how the process works every step of the way.

Speaking of questions, start immediately by asking what your insurance will cover.

Many insurances DO cover IVF but with very specific qualifications. Your provider may require you to try an IUI cycle a certain number of times before moving onto IVF, etc. Ask exactly what your insurance covers and what you need to do to meet your insurance’s demands to have IVF covered if it does cover it (it will save you A LOT of money).

Ask your doctor which plans you qualify for.

If you aren’t going through insurance, many of them offer special plans, but you have to meet very specific health requirements for it. Ask to see the plans early. Ask what you qualify for before deciding what you want to do with your fertility journey (this seems simple but they’ll show you all the options even if you don’t qualify for them).

Once you have decided on a plan of action, ask for the timelines.

For instance, many times before starting IVF, you will try an IUI cycle (Intrauterine insemination) or a super ovulation cycle. I did the super ovulation cycle, and the schedules are daunting. You are required to show up very specific days of your cycle very early in the morning at specific times, and you likely won’t know what that is until a day or two before AND you can’t bring children into these facilities, so if you already have a child, this gets even harder. So, I learned quickly to ask, “For my super ovulation cycle, exactly what days do you need me to come in,” prior to the cycle beginning. They could explain that I needed to do a premedical evaluation on Day 2 or 3 of my cycle (Day 1 is the start of your period, which is why this can be even more unpredictable). I was then needed on a specific day of the cycle in the middle of the month for them to do an ultrasound, which would potentially require another visit the following day or two days later. Then, I would need to come in for a pregnancy test. These fall on specific days of your menstrual cycle, so getting which days of my cycle I needed to come in in advance at least gave me some type of insight on when I would need to come in next. Scheduling was clearly very difficult, and it made it almost impossible to travel while we were going through this.

Any procedure that requires a Trigger Shot can give you a false positive pregnancy test.

It really feels like someone would tell you this when you are trying to have a baby, but somehow no one mentioned this to us. When you are doing super ovulation, IUIs, fresh transfers, or any procedure that requires a trigger shot, the trigger shot contains Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) in it. hCG is what pregnancy tests detect for. Your body makes hCG when you are pregnant. So, if you take a trigger shot and then test for pregnancy too early / too close to the shot, it can register as pregnant even when you are not. You get a really fun false positive. That’s awful for anyone going through this when they are desperately hoping to be pregnant: to get a positive test only to find out you’re not pregnant a few days later. So, if you take a trigger shot, follow the instructions on when it is safe to test afterwards.