What No One Tells You About Starting Fertility Treatment

The impact of fertility treatment can be overlooked and minimized.

You Are Ready To Start Fertility Treatment. But Are You Ready For Everything Else?

In 2016, when founder Joe Cody's wife was diagnosed with infertility, he immediately started doing research before starting fertility treatment. He was searching for information like:

What was the process like and how long did it take?

Well, a simple internet search found that while the IVF cycle itself only takes around 4 weeks, the full process can take up to 4 months. That isn’t awful.

What is the success rate for a couple our age with our health history?

Well, we plugged our information into the CDC IVF Success Estimator and found an approximate 58% chance of success with 1 cycle and an astounding 86% chance of live birth with 3 cycles. Again, that isn’t bad.

How much will I have to pay out of pocket compared to what benefits through our employer will cover?

This one hurt a little more. Our diagnosis required the use of donor eggs so insurance wasn’t going to cover that. And I soon realized medication, some testing, and other components wouldn’t be covered. However, being from Maryland, I knew that we had 3 cycles or $100,000 in benefits, which could cover a large portion of our treatment. We were lucky. We could afford this. Time to get started.

I was naive. Based on all of this, I thought that we would be done within a year. I assumed even if each cycle took up to 4 months, we could get 3 done in 1 year. Our insurance would cover up to 3 cycles and if those 3 didn’t work, we could switch to my insurance to get another 3 chances. Worst case scenario, we are pregnant and have a child in 2 years with cycles left over to have more than 1 kid.

Grain Fertility can help you prepare for fertility treatment.

What You Expect vs What Really Happens

In reality, it took almost one full year to have our first failed transfer. It took multiple months to get everything set up with our first clinic. Then, my wife had multiple cycles stopped due to fluid build up and possible ovarian cysts. It took time for our doctor to adjust medications to get the right combination of luck and skill to have her body respond like it needed to.

After each failed round, you want to get started immediately to try again. You know the clock is ticking. You want answers why the last round didn’t work. I viewed our problem as an equation, solving for variables and finding missing pieces to make the puzzle fit. And through this all, I expected someone to be there every step of the way, answering questions, preparing us for the steps, and helping us feel confident and comfortable.

What really happens is there often aren’t answers. Only educated guesses. And most of the work will fall on you. You don’t get as much time with clinical staff as you would like. You don’t get a detailed walk through of everything that is happening. Most of the journey falls on your shoulders.

All of this leads to the overwhelming feelings of stress, isolation, and anxiety that so many fertility patients encounter.

The Hidden Stressors of Fertility Treatment

The fertility journey is filled with hidden stressors that no one tells you the truth about. This isn't intentional deception, but merely a symptom of an incredibly complex process that has too many components to actually prepare you for without overwhelming you before you start. A few of them include:

The Schedule

The constant scheduling starts to take over your life. Countless appointments and monitoring, adjusting your schedule to ensure you are administering your shots at the right time, and looking at life events you used to take for granted like weddings and birthdays with dread.

The Effects

You are forced to become a nurse, pharmacist, and practice administrator all to ensure your medication is delivered on time, prepped, and taken. Your body starts to transform as the hormone levels change in response to the medication. Bruising, knots at the administration site, and bloating become something you think about every day.

The Administrative Burdens

From the beginning, you are constantly going back and forth with the clinic, your pharmacy, and your benefits provider (if you have one), trying to understand what is covered, what you owe out of pocket and why, and when the next bill comes. Even the most prepared budgeter can easily become overwhelmed with the complexity of paying for fertility treatments.

The Emotional Toll

On top of all of this, you are dealing with one of the most stressful and life altering experiences of your life. Data shows patients who are struggling to conceive report feelings of depression, anxiety, isolation, and loss of control. Depression levels in patients with infertility have been compared with patients who have been diagnosed with cancer (1). The impact of this journey affects your relationships with your family, loved ones, friends, and co-workers. It is easy to become resentful and withdrawn, hiding from the constant reminders society places in front of you that you do not have a child and others do.

The Isolation

Through all of this, most people don’t have someone to talk to. Evidence shows that patients who go to support groups, seek therapy, or work with coaches, respond more positively throughout the fertility journey. By offloading this burden and sharing the weight of infertility, you can start to take back some semblance of control in an otherwise uncontrollable situation.

How Grain Fertility Can Help

Grain Fertility was founded because all those stressors are things that we have experienced ourselves. Every day, we strive to help reduce the impact infertility has on your life, working to ensure that you have the support you need and resources you deserve to minimize the impact while maximizing your chances of success. We do this several ways.

Our one on one patient empowerment coaching helps walk you through your fertility journey, prepare you for the minutia of treatment, and provide a step by step explanation of whats next. Our empowerment coaching is built around preparing you for milestone events, the biggest parts of the treatment process ranging from egg retrievals to transfers, trigger shots to two-week waits.

We can go through your medication and prescriptions with you, provide you with personalized guidance on storage, administration, and scheduling so you don’t get surprised when something comes up. While we cannot replace the feeling of someone being right by your side during the hardest moments, we hear every day from our members how reassuring it is to know a Patient Empowerment Coach is available when you need them.

Our application lets you access, organize, and use all of the information you are responsible for during the fertility treatment process, reducing the overwhelming feeling and crippling anxiety that can impact so many patients. We know what it is like to have to remember all of your medications, test results, medical history, and balance the rest of your life. With our application, it makes it easier than ever to put that aside until it is needed, knowing exactly where it is when you need it most.

Our coaches have years of experience working for some of the largest fertility clinics in the world. This gives you access to a go-to person who can help answer your questions, work side by side with your clinic and care team to deliver personalized educational materials, and have you feeling more prepared and confident in your journey.

Our Patient Empowerment Coaches can help support you on your journey.

While there is no guarantee that we can help every single person achieve their dream of having a baby, we are committed to ensuring every single person struggling with infertility has the support they need and deserve.

(1) Rooney KL, Domar AD. The relationship between stress and infertility. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2018 Mar;20(1):41-47. doi: 10.31887/DCNS.2018.20.1/klrooney. PMID: 29946210; PMCID: PMC6016043.