A heartbroken woman has said she’s giving up on being a parent upending her life and spending an estimated $165,000 on in vitro fertilization.
“It feels like the death of a dream,” said Katie Abdou, 37, who feels doctors gave her false hope. “IVF has ruined my life.”
Now, the would-be mom in mourning is sharing her story with the hope that other women who are struggling through IVF won’t feel alone — and urge the medical community to provide more support to single and queer people who seek to start families.
Abdou said she’d always planned to be a mother, whether or not a viable father was in her life.
“I was never interested in being in a relationship but I always wanted kids,” the food broker from Plymouth, Massachusetts told South West News Service.
Without a partner in her life, Abdou initially looked into fostering and adoption but found those routes to be both expensive, bewildering and ethically dubious. “It felt icky to be buying someone else’s child because they couldn’t afford them,” she said.
So, she began her hunt for a donor dad through an online registry in March 2020 with the intent of giving at-home intracervical insemination (ICI) a shot.
After five failed attempts to get pregnant via ICI, including three early miscarriages, an X-ray revealed that her fallopian tubes were “blocked” “and that IVF would be her best and only option.
The cost of one round of IVF can range from $10,000 to $25,000, depending on various medications, fees, procedures and consultations needed for success.
Some insurance companies cover part or all of the cost of fertility treatment — not Abdou’s. She was forced to sell her house and move in with her parents to have the scratch for IVF.
After earning $100,000 from the sale of her home, she identified a clinic with affordable pricing in Albany, NY.
She went in for her first egg retrieval in November 2021, producing three embryos. However, two didn’t take while the final miscarried within the first five weeks.
Abdou said she was ready to “give up” at that point but pressed on when her “best friend” Chris, 37, offered to help her conceive.
With Chris’ sperm, she went for another round and became pregnant with one of the two embryos they created, and in November 2022 she learned she was pregnant.
“I was very excited but still very careful,” said Abdou, who remained with the child long enough to learn the baby’s sex. She was pregnant with a boy. “I had got the nursery all ready. I had planned the baby shower.”
Sadly, her 17-week ultrasound showed that her baby boy had no heartbeat and she’d need surgery to remove the fetus.
“He was gone,” she said. “It was awful,” Abdou cemented the memory of her only son with a ring she wears that’s comprised of her baby boy’s ashes, as well as a tattoo of his tiny feet on her shoulder.
No one was ready to give up on Abdou, including her doctors who insisted she should be healthy and fertile enough for a successful pregnancy. “Each time I tried [IVF] I had hope it would work,” she said.
After a failed attempt to transfer a remaining embryo from her second round — which didn’t take — and a third unsuccessful egg retrieval in April 2023, Abdou underwent surgery to remove polyps from her uterus. That’s when she learned she was living with chronic inflammation of the uterine endometrium, or endometritis — what likely caused her fertility issues, physicians said.
Abdou was given antibiotics to treat her ailing uterus — and a shot of renewed hope that her fourth round would be a success. She also began taking growth hormones and engaging in platelet-rich plasma (PRP) therapy, an experimental treatment taking healthy blood from separate platelets and injecting them back into the uterus.
It was not an easy process. “I had blackouts. I gained 50 pounds,” she claimed. “I used to be a confident person. I went from a size 10 to a size 22.”
Abdou came out of her next round in October 2023 with two viable eggs. Then, one night soon after transfer she awoke in excruciating pain. Her ovary had exploded and would need surgery to “glue” it together.
“I lost three pints of blood,” she said.
After doctors assured her ovary had healed “perfectly,” Abdou jumped into her fifth egg retrieval in January of this year — to no avail.
She still had enough medications remaining for one last attempt and did so in February, coming back with five fertilized eggs.
“I was thrilled,” she said, thinking, finally, “This is going to work.”
Of the five embryos, only one was transferred has the remaining eggs didn’t survive. On March 28, she reviewed the devastating news that the pregnancy has not taken.
“I felt like a broken person,” she said. “It changed me.”
Despite her heartbreaking journey, Abdou remains supportive of those who embark on their own IVF journey, though she wishes other potential parents could be more aware of the myriad complications before draining their bank accounts.
“I think there needs to be more support for single and queer people,” she said. “I’d love for more information on IVF to be available.”
