IVF - Genetic Testing gone wrong
Want to know how to zap all of your emotional energy for the day? Deal with the US health system. That will drain you, instantly. The first step of IVF for Drew and I was to do a genetic carrier screening. This looks at over 420 different genetic conditions to see if you are either a recessive or dominate carrier. If you and your partner are both carriers for the same conditions, a special test is created to test each embryo for that as part of the pre-implantation genetic (PGT-A in our case) testing.
The first thing that went wrong is that the company providing these home tests sent me the wrong one and Drew the right one. Eventually they sent me the right one. We did the saliva tests (OMG they needed SO much saliva!) and sent them off to the lab.
Pretty quickly I got an email saying my sample was received and asking for payment. I couldn’t tell from the online portal if it was payment for me AND Drew or just me. After getting hung up twice, and being on hold for forever, I finally got through to someone I could at least 50% understand (At this point I was pretty frustrated). I found out that that price was only for me and if I waited more then a week the price would more then triple due to losing a discount (WHAT??? Why wouldn’t you tell someone that on the invoice!?!?).
After hearing the price would triple if we waited to pay, I immediately paid mine and tried to pay Drews. It errored on me twice which meant that Drew had to call and sort it out. What he found out is that his email had been associated to THREE different orders (two of which weren’t his!), and he didn’t need to worry about paying because his was sent to insurance. That was odd to us because WE NEVER GAVE THEM OUR INSURANCE INFORMTION (whose insurance did they bill!??!). He requested the bill to insurance be canceled and a new bill be issued to him and was told it would take 3-4 weeks. Now folks, this is why my husband is amazing. I was LOSING MY SHIT and he was calmly figuring out the next best steps. My mind was racing at the implications of not being able to pay for his test for a month. Would that mean we wouldn’t get our results till then? How would that impact our hopeful egg retrieval in January? Would we end up losing that discount and paying 3 times the amount?
After a frantic email to our nurse coordinator we found out that we would be getting a discount for our trouble about Drew’s test, and the results would be sent to our doctors office promptly.
In the end…it all worked out. But I definitely got a few gray hairs, and lost a few years off my life from that interaction. Also, I’m not sure I would recommend that genetic carrier testing company anytime soon. I’m choosing to not see this as a bad omen about what the rest of this IVF adventure will be like.
