Thank you all
for your patience! We've been having a great time on our journey and I'd love
to tell you what has happened but that would be the spoiler of all spoilers
so...I cannot. Until then, your next installment of the Baby Steps blog awaits
you...
ISO Insurance
Coverage!
I think I knew
what was going to happen when I called my insurance company...maybe I was just
wishful thinking. I knew that some people had insurance that covered these
procedures for fertility but I was doubtful that my company was that great. It
wasn't just the company - it was also my plan that was causing me doubt. Since
I rarely needed to go to the doctor, I had the lesser of the three coverage
options and Rey wasn't even on my insurance and, of course, he didn't have his
own at the time. However, my thought was that if we found it to be cost
effective, we could switch to a higher coverage plan and get him on my
insurance. However, of course that meant higher monthly payments due to adding
Rey to my plan, not to mention what extra we would need to cough up if we had
to go with a higher coverage plan. Considering all this, I was imagining a
$200-$250 per month increase in coverage. So I wasn't really convinced that
going this route would actually save us money in the end, even if they did
cover these procedures, but I had to give it a shot anyway.
Our clinic had
given us a sheet of procedures we'd be having done with their associated
medical codes so that we could contact our insurance company to find out if
anything could be covered. The phone call I had lasted about 15 minutes. That
was how long it took me to read off the number of each code and for the
customer service representative to say, "No - not covered" for each
one. I hung up, feeling disappointed that fertility wasn't considered important
enough for coverage when so many couples these days resort to fertility
assistance to create their families. We had agreed that we would try every avenue
we could to help get this paid for by other parties before we started shelling
out money we didn't have. So, we carried on...
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ISO Sperm!
Of course,
people who don't have a healthy sperm-carrying partner have options when it
comes to determining where the second ingredient in baby making can come from.
You can go with a known donor. This might be a family member or friend who can
offer up their stuff for the purpose of creating a life. We know a lot of queer
couples who fantasize about this option but few who rarely go with it. There
are a lot of risks - the donor later wanting to be more involved in the child's
life than is wanted by the child's parents, one of the parents becoming
enamored with the donor because of the relationship he now has with the family
and how the child resembles him, or simply having a falling out with the person
over time. For us, this didn't seem like a great option. We had a couple of
people we might have asked but Rey wasn't yet fully confident in his maleness
and it worried him that our kid would have two dads...not just him. I think
that had we had the opportunity to make this decision two to three years down
the road, we might have chosen differently but at the time, this was the best
decision we could have made - not to go with this option.
The other
options are sperm banks - there are sperm banks that are certified and some
that are not - sperm banks for lesbians and sperm banks with only gay and
bisexual men's sperm - sperm banks for Jews and there have even been sperm
banks full of genius donors' sperm. Lucky for us, our clinic gave us a list of
four sperm banks to check with first. You simply go to the website for the bank
and browse through the profiles of the donors they are currently working with.
Most banks will include the donor's ethnicity, hair color, eye color, and
height on the donor search page. Once you click on a donor, you get whatever
other information they have available. We found that they would typically give
you a brief medical history of the donor and his family (usually going out as
far as aunt/uncles and even cousins and going back as far as grandparents).
They also usually had something more personal about the donor, whether that was
a brief Q and A with him, or the impression as written by the intake
coordinator working with him on his first visit to the bank. We would spend an
entire night going through a banks website and reading profiles of five or six
we thought deserved a second look.
We wanted a baby
that would potentially look like both of us. While we're both short (5'1"
and 5'3"), we don't look much alike apart from that. We began talking
about the amazing idea of having one child from Rey's egg and one
child from mine. We wanted them to be biologically related so we
would choose a donor that looked like both of us as much as possible - we'd have a natural-looking family that was also linked genetically. We searched through profiles, seeking the perfect blend of Rey's and
of my characteristics so we'd have a fair shot at achieving our dream.
We also were
adamant about the fact that the child have the ability to contact their donor
after reaching adulthood if they so chose. Both Rey's and my mom are adopted
and neither really know anything about their birth families which has caused a lot of questions and frustration over the years. We also wanted to
ensure that should our child have any medical concerns, they have the ability
to discuss them with this man who is giving them have of their genetic
material.
On one of the
first few nights of looking for a donor, we found one that seemed perfect. This
particular website had an audio interview feature where you could, for free,
listen to your donor's voice. Now, I'm not sure why anyone would find this
feature helpful...Rey was certainly not interested in hearing the voice of the
person helping to create his children. I, however, was just curious. It was
available, after all! Well, I can't really remember what he sounded like...it
was a bit weird though, admittedly, hearing the voice of someone who you don't
know but who will potentially be yo baby sperm donor daddy!We were really
interested in him but we'd forgotten to make sure he was interested in being
available to the offspring after they turn 18. Upon realizing this, we went back to his donor profile and - of course - he was not interested in this. In fact, none of them from that clinic were. The clinic's policy was such that no children coming from these donors could ever find their biological father. This was not unique. We went through three major clinics before we found one that gave their donors the option for contact with their offspring if and only if the child wanted it.
Finding "the one" and then having to let him go was really disappointing. It took a lot of energy and emotion and I was surprised at how drained I felt and how frustrated I was that we'd have to start all over again. But then again, we hadn't been looking all that long to begin with...it just felt like it!
When we got back
online to look again (a few nights later), we soon found another guy we thought was perfect! He was physically a
very good mix of our characteristics and his family history didn't have a great
deal of medical issues that we would need to be worried about. He was a
Buddhist and vegetarian he loved nature - just like us! We got to see his baby
picture and he happened to look a lot like Rey in his baby pictures. Even
still, it took us a few nights before we decided that he was the one. I looked at my paperwork from our clinic to make sure I was getting all the details right before buying something that doesn't come with a gift receipt!
We needed sperm for IVF, it said. This seemed self-explanatory since that was
the procedure we were planning to have. But upon return to the donor site, I
realized there were different prices associated with different kinds of sperm.
Different KINDS? I had no idea...You could get ICI, IUI, or IVF. I would find
out later that one type was frozen sperm, no semen and another was sperm in
semen that had been "cleaned". This was where someone had gone in and
removed all dead or super slow moving sperm so that the best and brightest were
the only ones left in the vial. IVF required regular old, traditional, out of
the dude and into the cup sperm.
I called
one day during my lunch hour at work to order the sperm. The woman on the other
end of the phone said, "Oh, honey...I'm so sorry but he's all sold out of
the IVF vials. Someone just bought the last one." I was dumbfounded. It
was hard to fully understand that this had happened again. That we'd have to look for "the one" again! It took so much time
and consideration to finally find someone good enough to go with... "Can't you call him and ask him to donate
again?!" I pleaded out of desperation. "Well, we can try...we would call
him and ask if he'd do it again and if he would, we would give the sperm
directly to you. However, just so you know, it would cost $1500 to make that
call, and there's no guarantees that he would agree...plus the cost of the
sperm." I couldn't speak. They'd charge me $1500 to dial his seven digit
number? I hung up disoriented and in disbelief.
Needless to say,
it took us awhile to get back online after that. It was about a month before we
sat down together to check out other sperm banks we'd not yet visited.
"They say the third time is the charm, right?" and with that and the
clink of two wine glasses, we were back to the business of finding a donor for
our future babies. We soon came upon a donor who had a very eclectic mix of
caucasian ethnicities, was rather short, had a PhD, and had a fairly clean
medical history. We also loved him because of how much he clearly cared for all
the women in his life based on his notes of them and their lives. He seemed
down to earth and real. He had smoked marijuana and he admitted to having had
depression - both of which we could identify with and both of which were rare
admissions in the world of sperm donation.
It was the next day when I got up the nerve to call for his
childhood photo. "Oh you're in for a real treat! It's a great
picture" said the woman on the other end of the phone. Sure enough, five
minutes later, we were looking at the cutest and happiest kid ever! A couple of
days later, we'd decided to go for it. I called on my lunch hour to order the
four vials of sperm we were advised to get so that we'd have one-to-two for
fertilizing Rey's eggs and at least two more for my eggs. The woman answered, I
gave her the donor number, and she said, "OK, how many vials?" "Four
of the IVF," I said. "Oh," she said. "We only have one IVF
right now. I'm sorry." No...no...no...no...This was not happening AGAIN!
"But I went to the website just three days ago and you had enough then.
She said, "OH, can you hang on just a second?" "Of course".
I waited, wondering what could have been so important that she had to put me on
hold at this critical moment in my life. I waited and waited for what felt like
five full minutes. She came back on the line a little out of breath and this
time, she said with a smile, "You'll never believe it but just today, five
more vials of IVF became available! We'll put your name on them if you'd
like!" And before we knew
it, we had bought four vials of sperm which would be overnight-shipped to our
clinic within the week. Baby-making ingredient number two - acquired!
