Showing posts with label 50/50 Odds. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 50/50 Odds. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Options: IVF with PGD or IUI

People in my situation have two not so fabulous but viable options for having a healthy genetically related baby.

Option A: IVF with PGD, my eggs and donor sperm
Option B: IUI, my eggs and donor sperm

Option A is quite expensive. It would involve doing IVF which would run us about $20-$30k. I am unlikely to respond well to stimulation so we aren't likely to get very many eggs, no matter how many hormones they throw at me. Any eggs we did get would be fertilized with donor sperm and biopsied on day 5 for PGD testing.  Luckily, Kaiser will cover PGD which will save us about $8,000 but it can be hard on the embryos and not all will make it. If we were lucky enough to have healthy embryos, we would do a FET, or frozen embryo transfer and hope that they take. We may potentially need to do IVF several times to get healthy, viable embryos.

Option B is essentially a roll of the dice with 50/50 odds. We would do an insemination with donor sperm and hopefully get pregnant. We would then do CVS testing as soon as possible, probably around 11 weeks, and then wait with everything crossed for the results to come back. If they come back negative, we get to have a healthy baby. If they come back positive, we would need to terminate the pregnancy. Kaiser will cover unlimited IUIs for us, so the bulk of the expense would be donor sperm, about $4,000 for 5 vials, but we would have to endure a 50% chance of terminating a desperately wanted pregnancy at around 14-15 weeks. I don't know how I'm going to cope with that.
(Source)
Our other options for a baby would be using an egg donor and sperm donor, adopting left over embryos, or adopting a baby.

I was originally leaning heavily towards IVF with PGD but IUI may potentially yield better results. People with FXPOI have a better chance of getting pregnant naturally or via IUI since we respond so poorly to fertility drugs. E is on board with either decision, though he would strongly prefer the option that doesn't bankrupt us.