Campaign Story

Hello there! My name is Shea Elliott and my husband is Ryan Elliott. Our infertility journey started in January of 2022. I had my first and only positive pregnancy test at the end of December in 2021, but it didn’t last long. We found out I had a chemical pregnancy in January 2022. I went to an OB and they told me to come back after trying to conceive for a year. Unfortunately, that year passed. I went back to the OB, they did lots of bloodwork, and we found out that I have low egg count. At first, we thought this only impacted the future, but turns out it also impacts the present. Because I have low egg count, my body doesn’t want to deplete its reserve, so it doesn’t release an egg every month. Therefore, I have many cycles where ovulation doesn’t occur. The OB told me that our best chance at getting pregnant would be if we saw a fertility specialist, so we were referred to The Fertility Center in GR.

Upon becoming patients at The Fertility Center, our doctor ordered bloodwork for Ryan, as well as a semen analysis. We found out Ryan had high prolactin which was impacting his sperm shape, count, and speed. After being bounced around between different specialities, stopping his anxiety medication, a pituitary tumor scare, and taking an intense medication to shrink a non-existent tumor (turned out to be a cyst), his numbers did all return to normal. Praise God!

We did 3 rounds of IUI at the fertility center and none of them resulted in pregnancy. We had another appointment with our doctor, and she told us it was time to do IVF. IVF is like this dark gray cloud before a thunderstorm… It is VERY overwhelming. The oral and injectable medication, ultrasounds, procedures… the price tag. It’s a lot and it sucks. It sucks that we are here. No one imagines they’ll get to this point. We are 25-26, watching our friends start families or grow their families, and we thought we’d be there too by now. We believe that we’ll be able to start our family in God’s timing. With that being said though, we want to take the next steps in our treatment plan.

We were told we’d likely have to do at least 2 retrieval cycles before we do our first transfer because Shea has low egg count. The billing department at our doctor’s office told us people spend an average of $15,000 for one retrieval and one transfer, and because we are overachievers, we will likely be in the $20k range. Unfortunately, we just can’t save that much money in such a limited time (our doctor wants to start retrieval in the next 6 months), so we started a fundraiser page to hopefully offset the financial burden. We think we’ll be able to save up to 50%, and we were hoping to get some help with the other 50.

Please feel no pressure to give, even just praying for us or sharing our story would be helpful!

Thank you for reading!
Ryan & Shea Elliott