Well its been 9 months since James our little IVF miracle arrived. Yesterday I got a call from the clinic that we did the IVF with. While the gentleman I spoke with was very nice I find myself wanting to call them and tell them that while I am thankful for everything they did to help me have James in our lives, I think they are jerks...or something more colorful.
When we got pregnant my blood test results were lower than average, way lower. So the news that I was pregnant was delivered with a warning that this was a impending miscarriage and not to get my hopes up. My visions of big sister t-shirts for Megan to announce the news disappeared. Mike and I couldn't tell people we were expecting with out adding a "but" to caution them on not being too excited.
To make a long story short, said averages didn't do what they were supposed to (double every 24 hours), for the first two weeks. Ultrasound could not find a baby and the clinic washed their hands of me and were basically waiting for the miscarriage to take place. At one point when I called to get my Progesterone prescription refilled the girl said "Aren't you supposed to just miscarry?" I still hate her by the way. Well at 8 weeks they found a heartbeat...oh awesome we can relax...well not so much...baby was measuring too small for the stage of pregnancy we were. Blah Blah Blah. Bleeding at 10 weeks was the assumed miscarriage. The confirming blood test relieved almost normal test results...OMG you mean I am still pregnant!?! We must have lost one of the two babies we transferred is what they assumed and that allowed for the remaining baby to begin to do better. We went for 20 weeks with bleeding, and being told nothing could be done until after the 20 week mark when the baby will be viable at that time we were finally treated like a normal pregnancy that would result in a actual baby! Our regular Dr. did that, never the clinic. The clinic did not have much to do with us after the 12 week mark, but we were happy about that turn of events.
The last 20 weeks of my pregnancy were pretty normal other than a fun emergency trip to the hospital at 30 weeks for kidney stones. James arrived 4 days before his due date, healthy and happy, 7 pounds 2 ounces 20 inches long.
I have been chewing on my annoyance with this clinic since the first phone call with my kind of positive test results but didn't say much because the fact remained that I was pregnant and it was because of those professionals. Why should I expect more than that right? I guess I am super annoyed today because they are 9 months late with the baby info phone call. We were told that we would get a call the two weeks after our due date to get the information and stats on our delivery since I was part of a study group. We never got the call. I assume one of the overly optimistic staff at the clinic wrote MISCARRIAGE in red on our file and tossed it in a pile. Maybe they decided that 9 months after my due date was a good time to call and get the details of my failed pregnancy. The guy sounded shocked when I told him we had a healthy little boy who arrived on time. He ended the phone call with a "I'll mark this information on your file, have a good day Mrs. Kaiser" and that was it. I do have to say he was the nicest person I have spoke with to date from that office.
Now the icing on the cake is that we are getting bills from them requesting more money...yeah awesome. From what I can tell someone made a error when doing our billing and applied insurance payment to something insurance didn't pay. On our original paperwork it showed up as a "insurance discount". They didn't do anything about it until earlier this year, and now of course want payment. Red "Pay immediately" stickers are on all paperwork, its fuel for the fire for me since I am already annoyed. Never mind that back when we had the money to pay for all of this I asked billing what we owe so we could get it out of the way and I paid the amount requested. We discussed that I had a high deductible insurance that didn't cover fertility treatments and I assumed we would have to pay for everything. We were told we couldn't even start IVF until it was paid for in full. Now apparently we still owe around $2,000.00. Sorry for being less than inclined to write a check, not to mention our "Baby Making Money" is long gone!
I know I am ranting, and hopefully writing it out will get it out of my mind. Yes I didn't have the pregnancy and experience I visualized when we started this journey. But I did end with the result I visualized. An adorable little boy that loves me and I get to watch grow into a little man. I am so grateful he stuck and showed the averages where to stick it! The other disappointments will just have to go away when they go away.
Would I go to that clinic again? Doubt it.
I sometimes wish we could go another round and try for baby #3, but we just can't do that financially again. It breaks my heart that 5 more babies (they call them embryos, but they are babies to me) are in that clinic waiting. Hopefully Mike and I will figure out what the best route will be for approaching that sensitive issue in the near future.
For now I am going to continue raising my kids and loving my family. Thanks fertility people for getting me pregnant, I'll get over your lack of compassion and bedside manner eventually.
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| I love that little boy! |
