Campaign Story

My name is Mariah and I suffer with a reproductive disease called polycystic ovarian syndrome, or commonly referred to as PCOS. PCOS is a hormonal disease in women that can effect many different things, including a woman’s fertility. In many women’s case, they have no issue getting pregnant with PCOS, however my case is advanced. My body does not produce or mature it’s own eggs.. therefore meaning I will never have the chance to conceive a child naturally. Our only hope at ever conceiving a child of our own is through IVF (in-vitro fertilization). The cost of IVF varies anywhere from $15,000 to $25,000, and in our case is going to cost us upwards of $19,000. To help us cover these costs I recently took a job with Starbucks, one of very few companies that offer any kind of fertility insurance. Starbucks insurance will cover up to $25,000 in IVF related treatments and another $10,000 in IVF medications. This is an amazing benefit that they offer, and honestly IVF would be completely unfeasible to us without it. However, one of the many “catches” on IVF billing, is that EVERYTHING is billed separately. So even though my primary fertility doctor may be in network and covered by my insurance, some other things may not be. We recently discovered this when it was time for me to enroll in my benefits. Everything is covered by my insurance except for 2 fees. One of the fees being the largest, our lab fee, which is $5,000 due up front before they will even begin the IVF process. Another fee that is not covered by insurance is my facility fees, which is another $1,800 due at the baseline appointment before they will start anything else. This means before we can even start the treatments we need to come up with nearly $7,000 out of pocket to pay. We were unaware of these uncovered fees and had already scheduled our cycle to start the first week of March (roughly March 5th). I’ve already started the baseline medication needed to proceed with the cycle and at this point we were just waiting for Mother Nature to make her appearance and then it was show time for us! Or so we thought.. With this discovery, it is liable to push everything back several months in order for us to save up this extra $7,000 to begin with our cycle. So with that, here we are.. asking for help. If you know us, you know just how badly we want this and how much this means to us. We want nothing more than to grow our family and have a child of our own. At this point we would do anything necessary.. and I believe we’ve showed that. Even if it’s just $5, every penny adds up. We are more than appreciative of anything at this point. It seems like this whole journey has been nothing but curve balls and standstills. All that we want is CHANCE at our baby, and so far that is more than we’ve been given. So please, if you can find it in your hearts to donate at all it would mean the absolute world to us. And even if you can’t donate monetary donations at this time, we sure would appreciate any extra prayers you have to give.

We will never stop fighting for our chance to be parents

-The Coopers ❤️