Honestly, the amount of time I spend talking and stressing about sperm is ridiculous, especially for a lesbian!!! Straight people, and especially the majority that donāt have fertility issues, have no idea how good theyāve got it.
My wife and I have both always wanted 3 children. However, making our son cost us around Ā£8000. We both work full time and our jobs pay enough to live on, enough to put a way a bit of money each month, weāre comfortable! But itās just not cutting it when it comes to saving for a second child. Weāre worse off now than when we didnāt have a kid, our outgoings are higher having an extra person to feed and clothe and entertain. Weāre running a second car and had to take a loan out to buy that second decent car when my old one broke down suddenly. I worked out that at the rate we can save, we can only do IUI twice a year. And it has a success rate of max 20%. How depressing is that? If we wanted to do IVF, it would take us YEARS to save for it. We really hoped we could have a two year age gap between our first two. And the third? Weāve pretty much had to give up on the idea of a third.
Weāre in the UK so we donāt have things like insurance, all of our costs are out of pocket. The NHS wonāt help in our area until we have 6 failed IUIs under our belts, that will cost us roughly Ā£18,000. Whereas a straight couple has to try via the conventional method for 1 year and fail to get pregnant. Which is FREE. I get that they canāt automatically help us just because we lack sperm but itās very frustrating.
I was really hoping to be able to afford to try twice more before the end of the year but the costs just keep adding up and making it less likely. Thanks to Brexit, thereās an extra 20% VAT on all things imported into the UK from Europe. Our sperm is shipped from Denmark due to the UKās shortage, which means roughly an extra Ā£200 per vial of sperm we ship over (we already pay 20% VAT on the sperm when we buy it as well!!!). (I totally voted against Brexit btw and feel even more justified in doing so now.) It also costs ā¬300 for shipping. My wifeās blood test checks ran out in June so weāve got to fork out for those to be done before our clinic will do my IUIs. Once we get the sperm shipped to our clinic, they will charge us Ā£400 to store it. Currently theyāre still charging Ā£100 per COVID test as a precaution (over-cautious in my opinion), so if they donāt get rid of those by the time we try again, itāll cost us Ā£200 per cycle as they require 2 each time. So itās not just the Ā£1000 per vial of sperm and Ā£1500 per IUI cycle. Itās mounting up.
My mum and step dad have been really great through all this. They gave us money to help out before we made our first, that bought my wifeās first properly reliable car (and a bit extra when we couldnāt quite swing it), they bought our travel system for kiddo #1 which was pricey! And theyāve already given us Ā£2000 to make #2 which is gone already after the first attempt and all pre-testing that I needed. Theyāre going to help out again in a few months by paying for a round of IUI too, which Iām so grateful for. But still Iām not sure we can afford the 2 rounds by the end of the year! Iām now even at the point of considering asking for help from other family members. Iāve literally never asked for money my whole life.
Iām really reluctant to have to do any fertility stuff January - March because of the sporadic but often quite bad snow that weāve got the last few years. Itās a 60 mile drive to our clinic and I had a car accident due to the snow in 2018 so I have major anxiety about driving in the snow. And my wife has major anxiety about motorway driving after a lorry knocked her off the road shortly after my accident. So driving around that time is not ideal. But can we afford the tries weāre hoping for before that? I donāt know.
The next stress is our sperm donorās stock is running out. Every time I look itās gone down, and in fact since I last looked, itās gone down by about 30 vials. Thereās only 60ish left total, 23 left of the MOT20 that we buy. The other vials are an extra ā¬400 as theyāre MOT30. Weāre buying 2 vials for our 2 attempts, but will have to keep a check on them and buy more if we can if it gets crazy low. We really want to use the same donor if we can, so our kids can at least be genetic half siblings. Our donor has no quotas left for UK, which means that there are 10 families that have bought sperm from him in this country. Thatās not counting how many from Europe where they donāt have a cap in most countries. So the remaining sperm could sell out FAST with that many people using it!
With the sperm stock being so low, weāve decided only 2 more IUI attempts and then itās time for IVF. Weāre hoping to avoid having to do something so invasive but we canāt afford to keep trying IUI if the sperm is going to run out. We canāt afford to buy that many vials. The only hope we have of doing IVF is taking out a loan. This stresses me out further since we already have a loan for our car and our outgoings are high. When Iām off on maternity leave, most of that time Iāll only be paid statutory maternity pay which is about Ā£150 a week. Itās good that we get paid, I know a lot of countries donāt get that, but with that much of a pay cut, weāll be living pay check to pay check, and if we take out loans, I donāt know if weāll even be able to get by.
If I could live my life without ever having to hear about straight people getting knocked up by accident, that would be great, thanks! Itās so hard to not have access to sperm. Also, if people would stop telling us that thereās āno good time to have a kidā and that everyone thinks they wonāt be able to afford it (when theyāre clearly not thinking about the fact that weāre concerned about the cost of MAKING a child, not keeping one alive).
All I want is another child, my body knows itās time, Iām yearning for a baby that doesnāt even exist yet. Waiting is killing me, and not knowing how much time it will take is the worst. And the ultimate agony is knowing that we canāt just keep trying. It feels like weāre in the process of trying since our first failed IUI in May, but each month thereās no chance of success. Every month when I start getting PMS symptoms, the very same symptoms as you might get in early pregnancy, I get sad because I know itās just PMS. Thereās no chance of a baby.
