April Fools

I realize that it’s literally almost the last day of May, but what is time anymore?

How is everyone doing these days? Hanging in there?

I’m doing OK. I have good days and bad days, mostly good days. At least when I have my sad days, I know it is temporary and I just lean into it and know it will pass. I’m still doing therapy with my therapist via Zoom, so that has really helped. Even though I don’t have much to discuss, it at least gives me some sense of normalcy. But let me say, seeing yourself cry on a Zoom video call is not an attractive thing.

Now on to the subject of this post. When we last left off, I had some insurance snafus and was moving to a new fertility clinic. One, because they took my insurance, and two, because they would transfer my mosaic embryo, if I wanted to do so.

It was about a day or two later after that last post that the new clinic called and said that they contacted the new insurance provider and the new provider was saying that I didn’t have coverage for fertility treatments.

This led to many, many phone calls with Cigna. Every single person I talked to said the system said I had coverage, they didn’t know why all the claims I had for the egg retrieval already were being denied and they would get back to me. The very nice woman I talked to was like “this is so weird. I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

Fast forward to April 1, and I finally heard back from the nice lady. And it wasn’t good news. She was so, so, so sorry, but it turns out there was an issue on their end and their system was incorrectly stating that I had coverage for fertility treatments. It’s why several people told me the same thing. But something in their system was incorrectly giving out that information. And they were very sorry to give me this news.

This was obviously REALLY bad news. I was literally already starting some priming meds to start my next egg retrieval. I had ordered a several hundred dollars worth vial of a new medication we were going to try with this retrieval to hope for more eggs. (It’s still sitting in my fridge.)

My next step was to figure out how much it would cost out of pocket to do the retrieval with the new clinic. This was also bad news. It would be WAY more than what it would have been at my old clinic. Plus with the current state of the country and economy, it did not seem to be the best idea to take out a very large loan to pay for it, especially knowing the results may not be any better than the last time.

It was hard to come to terms with this, knowing that I did do all the things to help my egg quality and it didn’t really didn’t do much. Yes I got one embryo to make it to Day 5, but it also wasn’t a 100% normal celled embryo. And risking upwards of $20,000 to maybe get another embryo to try wasn’t sounding like the smartest thing financially.

I sat on all this for a few weeks (hence why I’m writing this post on May 27). I had enough anxiety and stress with all the pandemic bullshit, I didn’t have the bandwidth to mentally think about this. But once quarantine became the new normal, I had more energy to think about this and how to move forward.

The good news was that after that few weeks, I heard again from Cigna and they would be paying for all the ultrasounds and blood work and surgery from my egg retrieval, so I wouldn’t have to pay for that. It was their mistake, they said I had coverage, so they would pay all my claims.

So that was a HUGE relief knowing I wasn’t going to have another $10k bill to cover.

That got me thinking about my next steps. And what I decided was that I would transfer my mosaic embryo. That somehow I bucked the system and basically got a free egg retrieval and that my one embryo was a lucky one. So maybe, just maybe, this little boy was meant to be my son all along.

I know that nothing is guaranteed. And I know that because there were abnormal cells, this could all lead to a miscarriage anyway. But I have to try. I owe it to myself, and my little frozen embryo.

Because WHY NOT?