As I have shared more openly about our infertility journey and the treatments that we’ve tried over the years, I’ve become a bit desensitized to how often people ask me what everything costs or how we’re paying for all of this.

In our situation, these treatments have been something we’ve paid for almost entirely out of pocket. While infertility testing is covered under our health insurance, the actual infertility treatments are not covered (I’ll let you guess which costs more). Because we had such generous help from our families once we began the IVF process in 2020, and we were able to creatively stretch our budget when we needed to, we also chose not to finance our treatments. But while there are very real financial costs to infertility, it’s the physical and mental costs that I anticipated even less when we began our treatments five years ago!

If you read my June goals post last week, you’ll know that we completed a second IVF egg retrieval cycle earlier this month! When we wrapped up our first retrieval cycle in March (you can read all about it here!), completing a second retrieval cycle right away was not even on our mind. But now, having gone through it and knowing the results, we are glad we took that extra step!

Since my last update on our journey last August, we’ve finally made some progress, friends - we have completed our first round of IVF! Now, there are a few things that happened leading up to that milestone, so let me catch you up to speed.

This December marks the fourth holiday season that I’ve said to myself, “This will be our last Christmas without a baby.” For the last four years, each time we get to this point in the calendar I have steeled my nerves, soldiered on through the holiday gatherings, and done my best to not show my sadness when answering questions about when Kurt and I were going to start our family.