The One With Ted Talking
Hi there! As Rebecca promised last week, this is not-Rebecca (Ted) writing today!
Let’s talk about how our infertility journey is going – specifically about the costs, because it is not free. We have been tracking the costs associated with our infertility diagnosis and treatment, which include financial, time, emotional, and mental health tolls.
It has become abundantly clear that, at least in our corner of Ohio, health care is reserved for those who have the resources to afford it. It takes money, it takes time, and it takes attentive bandwidth to read the data and make decisions. Nothing is really free. Prepare for a #rant!
Finances
Rebecca owns her small business, which comes with perks and drawbacks. It’s been great that she can take a few hours each week and visit a doctor or TCM practitioner, because she sets her own hours. That’s a lot of time away from work during business hours, though – which means that she works evenings and weekends.
I work for a bigger company, a more traditional job. I get benefits for our family like health insurance and a health savings account. Not everyone is fortunate enough to get those, and we are thankful for them.
With that said – paying for medical care is confusing. Theoretically, we should be able to shop around for Medical Service X and pick the provider that we like best. It would be like shopping for toilet paper or a car oil change. Then insurance would do their part to pay for some fraction of the bill, accounting for network/deductible/etc.
Reality is different. When’s the last time you shopped for a required surgery? You follow your doctor’s instructions.
We tried to play the game (for science?) and see what would happen. Spoilers: headaches ahead. For one hospital procedure, Rebecca was told that the estimated cost would be $400…but when the dust settled, we had paid roughly $800 (including a bunch of bills that came to us requesting odd sums like $17.50 apiece) and were in no mood to fight the hospital or insurance.
Later, Rebecca actually attempted to shop for another medical procedure like a commodity. She called the recommended hospital and asked for the price. The answer to that required a multistep process. First they had to register her in their system and get the order faxed from the doctor (twice). Then they told Rebecca that they could not give her an actual estimate…but they could look up the typical cost for someone with our insurance. Well, that’s not very helpful even if we could get competitive estimates from other hospitals.
Free market and consumer choice to drive value of care? Boooooggguuuussss.
Mail from insurance and hospitals is not exactly crystal clear either. Insurance sends statements of coverage – how much they paid and how much we must pay. It’s not like we could really argue. We would have to invest time and attention to wrangle with them to perhaps save some money. For a recent hospital bill, for example, they have an option for financial assistance – but we would have to jump through 22 hoops (or more) to merely apply for it. I counted the questions and the answer fields. I imagine that if we seriously needed (A) medical care and (B) financial assistance to pay for it, it would not make us happy to do that dance, especially amidst a pandemic and economic crisis.
Suppose we did not have my employer-provided health insurance. Then either
- We would have to shop for insurance (so much fun wooo yay)
- Or we would have to pay cash for everything
But we do have health insurance. We try to pay for most of those bills with our health savings account (HSA). That’s nice, but it’s another account to track. If we did not have the HSA, then we would have to pull from savings to cover the bills. As it is, we are using money that we had stockpiled for pregnancy, birth, and pediatrics. What a fun deal.
Suppose we didn’t have the resources to pursue this health journey. Suppose family finances and private insurance were not enough. We would have to turn to Medicaid and hope that system worked for us. Suppose we didn’t have the time or mobility to pursue it. I guess that would suck and Rebecca would stay kinda sick?
Emotional Costs
There are two benefits we have found during all this. First, we are learning more about Rebecca’s health and we are making her healthier. Second, our marriage and relationship have been strengthened. We’re getting better at communicating and making choices to support each other. All of that is very important to me, because I’m her husband and I love her.
However, the emotional and mental health costs have been high.
It hurt to endure our early pregnancy loss, after which this project was named.
It was frustrating how many consultations it took to diagnose Rebecca with a common disorder she has had for years.
It was discouraging that one of the first medications she was prescribed came with a lifetime dose limit, and there were carcinogenic risks beyond that limit.
It’s a bummer that Rebecca’s transformed diet, while making her healthier and happier, has also made her extremely sensitive (in bad ways) to gluten and dairy and caffeine and alcohol – things she used to love.
We love our friends and family who are pregnant or have kids. We love their updates and family photos. But it still reminds us of the children that we don’t have.
We feel a little let down by the sympto-thermal family planning method, which we diligently followed but it did not address our fertility problem.
It was frustrating to find that the Creighton method, which seemed so hopeful, requires a trained professional to explain it.
We’re still forming our Battle Plan for how to attack treatment and move forward after the diagnostic phase is completed. It really, really sucks that we have to ask ourselves the question – how much is Rebecca’s health worth? (also – growing our family?)
Lessons
So what can we learn from all this?
We have learned that infertility is highly variable, and it is not one-size-fits-all.
Navigating health insurance and hospitals is not as fun as a beach vacation.
Another lesson is that women’s health care is *not important enough* to make it easy. It’s easy to go to a public park. It’s easy to open the faucet and pour clean drinking water. It’s been a big challenge for my wife to figure out how to heal her basic fertility, which is pretty damn important for her overall health.
This has been a TedTalk.
NEXT WEEK, Rebecca will be here with a look at some of the ways history has attempted to solve the ~problem~ of female fertility. It won't be particularly lovely.
AFTER THAT, we're taking a (very brief) wait from fertility to talk about vaccines. (Basically, there's been nothing in the news about them, so we thought it was time to bring them back into the limelight.) Rebecca has bioscience experience from school and working for Big Pharma, so she will share some comments.
We'll be back to our regularly scheduled infertility programming after that - we're meeting with our Napro again next week, we'll probably have a Creighton update and a sperm analysis saga - so much fun! Until then, have a great week.