I'm not a doctor. I'm not a wellness influencer. I'm a 39-year-old project manager from outside Chicago who spent the better part of her mid-thirties trying to have a baby. And failing. Over and over and over again.

If you're reading this, you probably know the feeling. The month that starts with hope and ends with a single pink line. Then another month. Then six months. Then a year. Then you stop counting months and start counting dollars.

Here's where every dollar went.

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Step 1: The Supplement Phase

Total spent: ~$2,400 over 14 months

It started the way it starts for everyone. Google. Reddit. TikTok. "Best supplements for fertility." I bought CoQ10 (ubiquinol, 600mg, the expensive kind). Vitamin D. Omega-3. Folate. Inositol. DHEA. Then someone recommended vitex. Then maca. Then red raspberry leaf tea "for uterine tone."

My bathroom counter looked like a pharmacy. I was taking 11 pills a day at one point. I kept a spreadsheet. I tracked my BBT. I did everything the forums told me to do.

After 14 months: nothing. Not a single positive test. Not even a chemical pregnancy. My cycles were still irregular. My luteal phase was still 9 days. I was buying hope in capsule form and it wasn't working.

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Step 2: Clomid and Letrozole

Total spent: ~$3,200 (3 cycles + monitoring)

My doctor put me on Clomid first, then Letrozole when Clomid didn't work. The idea was simple: force my body to ovulate. And technically, it did. But the eggs it produced weren't viable. My lining thinned out on Clomid. My progesterone crashed after ovulation.

Nobody addressed why my body wasn't ovulating properly. Nobody asked about the quality of what was being produced. The medications were band-aids—they forced a response but never fixed the underlying problem. After three cycles with zero pregnancies, my doctor said: "It's time to consider IUI."

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Step 3: Two Rounds of IUI

Total spent: ~$7,500

IUI felt like progress. There was a procedure. A date. A nurse. A room. It felt medical enough to be real. The success rate? My doctor said 10 to 20 percent per cycle, which sounded reasonable until I did the math and realized I was paying $3,750 for a coin flip—and not even a fair one.

Both rounds failed. My husband drove us home in silence both times. The second time, I cried in the passenger seat for 40 minutes. Not dramatically. Quietly. The kind of crying you do when you've run out of words for what you're feeling.

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Step 4: Two Rounds of IVF

Total spent: ~$52,000 (including medications)

IVF was supposed to be the answer. The big one. The thing that works when nothing else does. My doctor said with my numbers, I was a good candidate. My AMH was low—0.8—but "not impossible."

My first retrieval: 3 eggs. Only 1 fertilized. It didn't make it to day 5. Twenty-six thousand dollars for one egg that stopped dividing on a Tuesday afternoon in a lab I never saw.

My second retrieval: 2 eggs. Both fertilized. One made it to blast. We transferred it. I spent two weeks reading into every twinge, every cramp, every wave of nausea. Then the blood test came back. Not pregnant.

Here's what nobody told me before I started IVF: IVF doesn't improve your eggs. It retrieves them. If the eggs going into the cycle are compromised—by poor blood flow, inflammation, hormonal imbalance, oxidative stress—IVF can't fix that. It just works with what it gets. And what it got from me were eggs shaped by a body that nobody had bothered to prepare.

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Step 5: "Have You Considered Donor Eggs?"

Emotional cost: immeasurable

After my second failed cycle, my doctor sat across from me and said the sentence I'd been dreading: "With your AMH and your retrieval numbers, donor eggs might give you the best chance."

She said it gently. Clinically. Like it was a routine recommendation. But what I heard was: your eggs aren't good enough. Your body isn't good enough. The genetic connection you assumed you'd have with your child? Let that go.

I drove home. I sat in my driveway for twenty minutes. Then I went inside and told my husband I wasn't ready to give up on my own eggs. Not yet. Not without trying one more thing.

He held me while I said it. He didn't ask what the thing was. He just said: "Okay. Then we find it."

I just didn't know what that thing was yet.

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The Night Everything Changed

Three weeks after my doctor mentioned donor eggs, I was up at 1am doing what I always did—scrolling fertility forums. Reddit. TikTok. The same threads. The same stories. The same women running into the same walls.

Then I saw a post from a woman whose numbers were almost identical to mine. AMH of 0.7. Two failed retrievals. 2 eggs each time. She'd been told donor eggs too. But she'd tried something different before giving up: a personalized herbal formulation from a TCM practitioner named Dr. Ye who'd been working in fertility for over 40 years.

She said after 4 months on the formulation, her third retrieval got 9 eggs. 5 made it to blast. Her doctor asked what she changed.

I stayed up until 3am reading everything I could find about Project: Life. And for the first time in months, I didn't feel hopeless. I felt something closer to angry—angry that nobody in my two years of treatments had mentioned that the 90 days before a retrieval might matter more than the retrieval itself.

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What Made This Different from Everything I'd Tried

I was skeptical. I was so skeptical. I'd spent $2,400 on supplements that did nothing. Why would herbs be different? But the more I read, the more I understood this was something fundamentally unlike what I'd tried before.

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What Happened Next

I'm going to be specific because I know that's what you need. Not vague promises. Numbers.

I sat in that office and something broke open inside me. Not sadness—relief. For two years, every appointment had delivered bad news. This was the first time a doctor looked at my labs and didn't look sorry for me.

I scheduled my third retrieval.

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I'm Not the Only One

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The Math That Should Make You Angry

I spent $80,000 before I found Project: Life. Here's what Project: Life cost me:

For context: a single IVF cycle costs 10 to 20 times that amount. A single IUI costs 5 times that. The 11 supplements I was taking monthly cost $180—and did nothing because they were generic capsules designed for everyone and built for no one.

	Standard IVF Path	Project: Life
Cost	$15,000–$30,000 per cycle	$399/month
Personalized to Diagnosis	✗ Protocol-based	✓ Individually formulated
Addresses Egg Quality	✗ No	✓ Core focus
Dedicated Support	Shared nurse line	✓ 1-on-1 care advisor
Adapts Over Time	New protocol = new cost	✓ Included, no extra cost
Invasive	Injections, retrievals	Herbal tea, twice daily
Can Use Alongside IVF	—	✓ Yes—designed for it

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What I'd Tell the Version of Me From Three Years Ago

I'd tell her that nobody at the clinic was lying to her. IVF is real science. The doctors weren't bad people. But the system has a gap the size of a canyon: it retrieves eggs without ever addressing whether those eggs were healthy in the first place.

I'd tell her that the 90 days before her retrieval were the most important 90 days in the process—and nobody was going to mention that because there's no billing code for it.

I'd tell her to stop buying supplements off Amazon and find a practitioner who's actually spent their career on this. Not a brand. A practitioner. Someone whose work is built on 40 years of clinical patterns, not 40 days of market research.

I'd tell her she's not broken. Her body isn't failing. It just hasn't been given what it needs.

And I'd tell her to take the quiz.

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Who This Is For

• Preparing for IVF and want to optimize egg quality during the 90-day window before retrieval
• Been through IVF and it didn't work — poor retrieval numbers, failed transfers, no root-cause answer
• Diagnosed with PCOS, low AMH, unexplained infertility, or recurrent loss
• Tried every supplement — CoQ10, inositol, DHEA — and nothing changed
• Over 35 and feeling the pressure of time, told to consider donor eggs but not ready

If the system won't fill the gap, someone has to. This is mine.

Your 90-day window starts now.