SYRACUSE, N.Y. (NCC News) – When you can’t have a child naturally, the dream of having a child relies on eggs and sperm in a laboratory dish. Known as IVF or In-Vitro Fertilization, the procedure offers a pathway to parenthood for people who have trouble having children.
IVF can be a challenging process emotionally and physically, but it gave Grant and Hailey Garcia their baby girl, Daphne Jade Garcia.
“Overall just an emotional roller coaster really of…is this gonna work? Is this not gonna work? And then the added hormones of literally injecting hormones into your system. Doesn’t help with that,” said Hailey Garcia.
The Garcias tried naturally for three years before turning to IVF. The cost of one IVF cycle can range from $8,000 to $30,000 depending on the doctor’s office. The Garcias were fortunate because Elena’s parents paid for the IVF.
“We were desperate to have a kid and her parents were desperate to have a grandchild,” said Grant Garcia.
The Garcias have been married since 2017 and have always talked about having children. After Hailey Garcia was diagnosed with endometriosis and had two miscarriages the possibility of having a child kept decreasing.
“Every time we lost the kid or lost a chance, it felt like a blow, like a devastating blow to our hopes,” he said.
As of now, the Garcias have only had success through IVF.
The first step in IVF is taking fertility medications in the form of shots to help a woman’s ovaries produce several eggs. The goal is to make 10-15 eggs; it takes about two weeks until your eggs are ready for retrieval.
“Our first egg retrieval, we had a good number of eggs, but none of them turned into embryos,” Hailey Garcia said. “So, it was like okay this was literally like one of the most advanced things we could do and it still didn’t work.”
The retrieval process is a 15-30 minute procedure. The doctor uses an ultrasound to put a thin, hollow tube through a woman’s vagina and into the ovary that holds the eggs.
The next step is to combine the sperm with the best eggs which involves fertilizing an egg by injecting a single sperm into it.
The healthiest of eggs are then transferred back into the uterus in hopes that at least one will implant itself and begin to develop.
Currently, the Garcias have two embryos frozen but the likelihood of these embryos developing into a baby is lower compared to their baby girl.
People who decide to freeze their embryos must pay a monthly fee until they are ready to use them.
“If you don’t pay, they just would discard them and it’s like well that was like $10,000 worth of embryos. And so I don’t know, it’s kind of like a hostage situation honestly,” he said.
The Garcias plan is to try naturally first and go through IVF again in hopes of having another child.