Easy Peasy Fix and Oodles of Follies!

This morning was my stim day 4 appointment and we got surprisingly good news all around! Since Friday and Monday seem to be the clinic's busy days, there was a decent line for ultrasounds and blood work and I decided to go up to the financial office first. I hadn't received a call back from my contact yet but when I went up to her office she had already listened to my message and was ready to help.

As I already knew, everything on the estimate was incorrect. She took the aCGH testing off first since we are paying Reprogenetics direct and then corrected the third cycle ICSI to the second cycle price. I thought she might go back on her earlier statement about only paying the biopsy fee once but she didn't! She looked up the payment records, saw that we'd already paid it once, and took it right off the bill. I have to admit, I was impressed. I was expecting a lot more push back for what turned out to be a 5 minute conversation. Basically, I was working myself up, worrying about nothing. Whoops.

I would have just paid for the ICSI today since I had the estimate in hand, but our credit card company has helpfully decided to replace my card due to "potential fraud". As one might guess, the potential fraud they're referring to is my charge to IVFmeds.com, a charge that I had already spoken to a supervisor about and approved. This still wasn't good enough for them so I'm now waiting on a new card to come in the mail, and my old one will only work if they're swiping it directly, which neither SCRC nor Reprogenetics would do. Given the hassle, I figure it's better to wait and give them a card they can actually run.

With that all sorted out for the time being, E and I went down to my ultrasound and even more good news. Both my left and right ovary each had 6 tiny follicles, for a total of 12 follies after only 4 (really 3.5) days of stims! The largest on the left was 8mm with the largest right following just behind at 7mm. This means the follicles are well synced and will hopefully continue to grow at the same rate so they can all mature together. If you recall, I wrote about last cycles stim day 4 ultrasound here and I only had 8 follies visible at that appointment. I did an extra two days of suppression for this cycle so I'm not surprised these follies were a bit smaller but I certainly wasn't expecting to have an extra four right from the get go!

What I'm wondering now, is whether or not I'll have to stim longer than last cycle to give these follies more time to mature their payload. Are two extra days of suppression enough to require an additional day or two of stims? I already have to order a third cartridge of Omnitrope, with the adjusted dosage the two cartridges I bought will only last about 8 days and I'm anticipating needing enough for at least 11-12 days. I don't know if I'll get lucky enough to have Kaiser cover this last vial like the did the other two, but it would be seriously wonderful if they could.

Please order more things. I don't have enough boxes!

My next round of ultrasound/labs will be on Monday so in the meantime, I'll try to send lots of positive, growing thoughts to my follies. We want to keep them all growing nice and evenly so they're perfectly mature and ready to be fertilized after retrieval.

The Financial Fuckery Begins

One of the main complaints I've heard about the IVF process is a distinct lack of communication between the actual IVF staff and the financial department. The financial departments of IVF clinics all over the country get slammed for poor billing practices involving incorrect numbers, screwed up payments and noticeably poor communication. Knowing this going in, I spoke extensively with the financial department for each lab/clinic we're working with and quadruple checked my numbers to try and head off any potential problems. I made a valiant effort but apparently it wasn't enough.

When I got home from work this evening around 8:15pm, I found this letter waiting for me from ART, the surgical center in my clinic.

Um, No.

As you can see, there are several mistakes. For starters, it lists my ICSI fee as being for a third cycle - this is only my second. I actually owe them $150 more than the bill says here.

Secondly, they want $3950 for aCGH testing. This is so far off that it's crazy. We did in fact decide to add aCGH testing on, but we're paying Reprogenetics directly and the fee is only $2,250. That's no where near 4 grand and there's no way I'm paying that to ART. All of our dealings with Reprogenetics have been direct, there's no reason SCRC/ART should have any part in fee collecting for them.

Their third and final strike is the $1650 for embryo biopsy. Here the number is correct, but we've already paid it. Before signing up with SCRC, I confirmed over and over again that the fee for embryo biopsy was once due once when purchasing their two cycle plan. As I've already paid them their $1650 when we did our first cycle, we will not be paying it again.

I'm hoping these were innocent mistakes but I admit it really cheeses me off. I went over this with all the different financial departments - SCRC, ART and Reprogenetics and I was so hoping we wouldn't get slammed with the usual financial fuckery. When our first cycle got billed correctly I thought we'd avoided any pitfalls but it looks like I got ahead of myself.  I left a voicemail for my financial contact at ART since it was way after business hours and I sent an email to my financial contact at Reprogenetics.

Your clinic and labs hold all the cards when you're doing IVF - they literally have your embryos, your potential children, the lab has my probe, and SCRC has over $20,000 of our dollars so it's not exactly like we can stamp our feet and refuse to pay if they won't fix the problem. With any luck, I'll get two satisfactory answers tomorrow correcting this estimate because there's no way I can give them another $6,600.