The Science of Making Babies

Looking for a clinic
You need to check into the following information:

_ The clinics that are nearest to you. Long-distance IVF is possible but complicated.
_ The clinics that are accepting new patients.
_ How much clinics charge if you don’t have insurance.
_ Whether the clinics take insurance — not all do!
_ Whether the clinics treat patients like you, an important consideration if you’re over age 40 or have been turned down by another clinic.
_ The kind of feeling you get from the clinic.
For the answer to this question, you’ll probably need to make a consultation appointment with a doctor.
The clinic usually charges for this appointment. However, compared with all of the other costs associated with fertility treatment, the cost of the initial consultation is a relative bargain! You will have uninterrupted “quality” time with the doctor for 45 minutes to an hour. Before deciding on the clinic with which you are going to work, you should seriously consider visiting two or three that you picked out. You will find that this is a worthwhile investment of time and money.

You don’t need to commit to a program at your initial consultation. It never hurts to go home and think everything over before you go any further. Remember, also, that if you’re at one of the big-name clinics, you’re also being sized up as a candidate for its program, and you could be turned down
for treatment if you don’t fit the clinic’s criteria. Some centers don’t want to give you false hope if they don’t believe that they can help you, and others don’t want to bring down their statistics.

Whether you need or want to know everything about a clinic before you go there depends on your personality. You may be happy to go wherever it was that your best friend went, or to go where your insurance tells you to go, or to go to the clinic around the corner. There’s nothing wrong with trusting your instincts and other people’s personal experiences. However, if you’re already filling up infertility notebook number three, your family doctor’s recommendation that you just go to his golfing buddy probably isn’t going to convince you.