Campaign Story

Robbie and I have made some big sacrifices toward our dreams to become parents. We left our family, friends, and community behind in Colorado last year and moved to the (usually) frigid state of Minnesota where we could be closer to quality healthcare after a miscarriage, my major hip surgery, and ongoing struggles to conceive again. Not to say working for one of the most prestigious organizations in the world wasn’t a big driver, too.

Since then, we have experienced another pregnancy loss that required a round of chemotherapy to resolve safely. And we began the famously challenging IVF process — which may now look like a very expensive false start. 

We fully realize that the stigma around this is that it’s elective–if not indulgent. But we do hope we can all agree that this often-unstoppable human calling comes from something far deeper than any greedy, corporate insurance companies feel like admitting.

No, neither of us has cancer. We don’t need life saving treatments… we need life-giving treatments. I have put in a whole lot of very hard work to not only get my body to a place where I believe it can carry a baby safely after a couple of serious spinal & hip injuries… but perhaps more proudly, I worked through a lot of childhood traumas to ensure I could be a healthy & fitting parent before embarking on this journey. And it’s also no surprise to me that I had to do that work before meeting the love of my life at age 40.

Robbie is more than a very handsome and talented icing on that cake—he is a genuine and dedicated partner who is willing to put in the same kind of work. He has the best sense of humor and joyfully looks to take care of the people in his orbit from the time his feet touch the floor every morning. I want to give this incredible man the gift of fatherhood more than anything. So, I am in it to win it.

We started our IVF journey this year, believing it was barely in reach for us financially if we agreed to move 1000 miles toward a couple of better paying jobs at organizations with which we strongly aligned. And at first, it looked like we could barely make the math work.

I am a longtime producer and project manager… So you’d better *believe* I designed a very intricate spreadsheet system to compare all of our options after many weeks of diligent research, reading all of the health plan literature, and countless phone calls made to insurance companies, medical providers, and pharmacies across the United States.

Turns out, the health insurance documentation and phone representatives incorrectly assured me that our very expensive medication would be covered in full as soon as I met my out-of-pocket max for the year, which I was already approaching at the time I inquired. That’s what helped us balance the decision to choose the medical path that offered us the best odds given my age and biological circumstance.

Since then, we have encountered a nationwide pharmaceutical processing crisis that requires us to pay for everything out of pocket if we want to inject it on schedule. We have since been told that we will not be reimbursed for them, as promised. The insurance company now refuses to cover the things they promised-even though it can’t manage to provide us any documentation to support the sudden denial. There wasn’t so much as an asterisk to imply that what we were told up front may not stand. I looked! The discrepancy is costing us $16,500 (so far) and also means we can no longer continue the IVF journey we already started. And now here we are, midstream, and pretty unsure about what to do from here.

It’s going to cost us $60k+ to complete the process we already started — a number much higher than we were led to believe. Our choices are to give up (wasting the thousands of dollars already invested), hope for new legislation to be passed (but I’m 43 and don’t have the luxury of time), or face the stigmas and ask for help raising money for team baby. So, here we are, humbly putting it all out there – praying people are kind, perhaps especially if they aren’t interested in making a contribution. 

We know that chances are, you’re not related to us because if we had family to ask, we wouldn’t be doing this — but we are open to creating some honorary grandparent positions if our family trees successfully expand! The reality is, this ask may be as inappropriate to read as it feels to type it. But if you happen to be sitting on a few extra bucks and would like to see more super tall, socially-awkward, creative weirdos with big ‘ol hearts and curly locks running around in this world… we would sure appreciate your help overcoming the hurdles of this twisted system.

Whether or not you can contribute, sharing is caring. Please feel free to forward this to anyone else you think may want to help. We’re hoping to avoid shameless social media posts and prefer to share this more organically with the people that really love us and/or are passionate about making these procedures more accessible for all.

Every little bit helps! And if we can’t raise enough for our outstanding IVF rounds, we will apply whatever we do raise to medicated IUI efforts instead. Medication alone (for any option) is about $250/day! According to the “invest the cost of a cup of coffee a day” model, we’ll need 50 people to help us meet that goal alone.