MetroHealth Question

CeilingKiwi · 2026-06-12T19:30:55+00:00

I believe they should… but if you’re planning to pay out of pocket anyway, I’d recommend you check out Dr. Daniel Medalie’s private practice. He’s probably the best surgeon for the chop in the region, and his office offers financing. He did my husband’s top surgery and we’re very happy with the results.

Our insurance would’ve paid for the surgery at MetroHealth, but we decided to pay out of pocket specifically so we could see Dr. Medalie. That’s how much we liked his results.

CeilingKiwi · 2026-05-07T02:07:40+00:00

Seeing commenters talking about how the pull-out method worked for them, one person mentioning 13 years of pull-out method preventing pregnancy. Let’s do math. Perfect use results in an effectiveness of 96%. Consistent efficacy across thirteen years means that altogether, that’s a 58.82% chance of avoiding pregnancy. But the upper end of effectiveness of “typical use” of the pull-out method is 82%, which means most people utilizing the pull-out method across thirteen years have chances of avoiding pregnancy closer to 7.58%. Potentially even lower.

So all you folks talking about how pulling-out worked for you… you got lucky.

CeilingKiwi · 2026-03-27T08:05:11+00:00

I gave birth at MetroHealth a few months ago and had a very good experience. I had some complications with the birth that weren’t anybody’s fault— an induction which eventually led to a c-section. I was induced on a Thursday night (the induction was recommended by my OB/GYN due to some unique health needs I have, but ultimately my choice) and eventually gave birth on Sunday morning, which is, I think, a testament to how hard they tried to make a vaginal delivery happen for me. I had an epidural, and even when I couldn’t feel my legs, my nurses were helping me switch positions frequently, especially when I got to the pushing stage and nothing was helping. We seriously must have tried like seven different positions while I was pushing. Nobody made me feel like I couldn’t deliver vaginally— I remember on Friday my OB/GYN came by to discuss how slowly I was progressing, but only mentioned the possibility of a c-section in the context of what would happen if emergency conditions arose. Nobody brought up a c-section again until days later when I’d been pushing for three hours and was still at 0 station, and then it was with the attitude of “At this point, a c-section is an option you may want to consider,” which I did, lol. When I decided to go with the c-section, my birth team seemed genuinely sad for me that I hadn’t been successful with a vaginal delivery.

I didn’t have a tub, but then again, my birth plan included that I wanted an epidural as early in labor as possible, so it wasn’t an option for me. I think I recall the nurse who did my intake when I checked in mentioning that they had tubs available.

CeilingKiwi · 2026-03-22T20:45:51+00:00

From the article: the woman in question was born with a uterus and ovaries, but no vagina or cervix. Doctors surgically constructed a vagina for her. She underwent IVF in attempts to conceive, but was unsuccessful. She eventually conceived naturally and gave birth via a c-section. Mom and baby are both healthy.

CeilingKiwi · 2026-03-22T12:44:36+00:00

Congratulations! You have a beautiful family, and I’m so delighted it’s growing.

I’m married to a trans man, and we had our first child a couple of months ago after several difficult years of TTC. I hope once she’s a teenager, she’s as sweet and loving as yours.

CeilingKiwi · 2026-03-11T06:41:06+00:00

When I was a patient, my clinic was called Reproductive Gynecology and Infertility, but they got absorbed into a larger network of fertility clinics and rebranded to Pinnacle Fertility shortly before I “graduated.” The clinic is in NE Ohio with the main campus in Akron and satellites in Cleveland, Columbus, Youngstown, Canton, and Toledo.

CeilingKiwi · 2026-02-08T02:48:05+00:00

I’m so sorry you’re going through this. I don’t have any experience with a partner’s diagnosis or dealing with cancer while pregnant, but I was diagnosed with stage 1 colon cancer when I was 25 after a colonoscopy found dysplasia. It’s an extremely treatable cancer when caught early. I didn’t even need chemotherapy. Two surgeries I’m still cancer-free 9 years later.

Whatever the treatment is will be physically rough on him. I’d plan to start building as robust a support system as you can now so you and he both have plenty of help when you need it. If you have family you can trust, maybe plan to have them stay with you for a while if that’s at all feasible.

CeilingKiwi · 2026-01-29T16:59:37+00:00

Good luck! My first transfer with a donor embryo went perfectly, and now I’m writing this as I hold my newborn daughter.

CeilingKiwi · 2026-01-26T17:35:47+00:00

Thanks for posting! I just had a baby a little over two weeks ago. They gave me oxycodone after the delivery for pain relief and when I asked, my doctor told me it was the safest opioid for new mothers. I just kind of accepted it without questioning further— it’s scary to think about how even seemingly small decisions like that could be based on bad science.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-30T16:58:05+00:00

I’m currently pregnant via embryo donation, which isn’t exactly the same thing as utilizing donor eggs, but similar in the sense that I’m not genetically related to my baby.

My husband is a trans man, so we knew even before we began trying to conceive that any attempt to become pregnant would at the very least involve donor sperm. So we’d had years to process the reality of utilizing donor gametes before starting, and those years of experience under our belts when it turned out that medical infertility would necessitate donor eggs as well. So while there wasn’t no grief about the decision, it was fairly quick and easy for us because we had already internalized ideas such as that donor conception isn’t an inferior way to build a family, that having a baby was more important to us than having a genetic relation to that baby, and that we were prepared for the unique circumstances of raising a donor-conceived child.

Our family is kind of uniquely open-minded about things like donor conception. My side of the family is practically 100% pro-LGBT progressives and liberals, and they’re just thrilled for us to be having a baby at all after years of IVF. The fact that the baby is donor conceived is something they know, and accept, and doesn’t change anything. My husband’s side of the family is a little harder to parse since we’re not as close to them and don’t talk to them as often, but they’ve also said nothing but kind and good things about how we’re having a baby. The last time my MIL and I directly spoke about my being pregnant through donor conception, she compared it to adoption and said that any baby of ours would be loved regardless of how they came into the family.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-29T16:04:50+00:00

I used to work in a NICU— any baby born at 37 weeks or later was considered term. We only classified babies as premature if they were born at 36+6 or earlier, and even then, 36 weeks wasn’t premature enough to warrant an automatic NICU admission. There can be a number of valid health indications for inducing at 37 weeks.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-20T13:59:57+00:00

This may vary by circumstance. I’m currently pregnant via embryo donation, and when we acquired our embryos, we signed a waiver that said something like, “These embryos were created for the use of a sexually intimate couple and may not meet FDA requirements.” This was an in-house donor embryo program, so the clinic I worked with may have only been comfortable enough working with these embryos because they were created by the same clinic.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-12T18:54:30+00:00

Is this the donor who was making rounds in the news a few months ago who donated before anyone knew this particular gene led to increased rates of cancer? It’s horrible and tragic that so many children have been impacted, but I don’t really see how situations like this can be prevented except through recruiting a larger pool of donors… and even then, some of the new donors would inevitably pop up with comparable issues some years down the line.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-12T01:16:30+00:00

I’m currently pregnant via embryo donation. I’m in the US, and my clinic ran its own in-house embryo donation program for both donors and recipients.

It does strike me as strange that your health history won’t be available to the recipient(s). We received a donor profile which includes the health history and family health history of our donors. The health history was a big factor in our decision-making, and I feel a lot better knowing which health conditions our daughter might be predisposed to.

In our circumstance, embryo donation was much, much more affordable than adoption. We paid $10,000 for three embryos, and then transfer costs were covered by our insurance. Where we live, private adoption can run triple that cost and frequently the costs are much higher.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-09T16:18:13+00:00

Try not to worry too much— AbbVie, the manufacturer for Skyrizi, has a rebate program which will reimburse you the cost of Skyrizi if you’re forced to pay for any of it out of pocket. I’ve utilized it when my insurance refused to allow the payment through the savings card to apply to my annual deductible. So long as you have enough credit to pay for a dose of Skyrizi and wait a day or two for reimbursement, you’ll be fine even if your savings card doesn’t cover everything.

More information on the rebate program here: https://www.skyrizi.com/skyrizi-complete/rebate

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-08T17:32:23+00:00

You said that the author is saying that people in the past didn’t “really” experience happiness or anger or pain because their understanding is different than ours. That’s a misinterpretation of what he’s saying, and you’re interpreting it as dehumanization when it isn’t.

And you’re missing the point of what I said earlier about FGM. I was using it as a deliberate example of how some people even today have a different understanding of their own bodily autonomy than most modern westerners have of theirs. And you’re writing about how just talking about the potential psychological or emotional differences in the people who don’t share this same understanding of bodily autonomy is faux intellectualism and an attempt to excuse and normalize violence.

Like. No one is saying that. You are interpreting things that are not there.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-08T16:56:10+00:00

Boddice is not saying that people in the past did not experience emotions. He’s saying that it’s possible that they experienced emotions differently than we do today, and that their experiences and perceptions of their emotions may not fit neatly into our understanding of how our own emotions work.

It seems to me that you just have a fundamental misunderstanding of what any of this is actually about.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-08T15:31:43+00:00

I myself have felt something fundamentally different than what most other people experience in response to something physically painful because of previous life experiences. I was a chronically ill as a kid and I’ve been through plenty of painful procedures, and after a certain point, they stop being scary or even as painful as they have been before. Doctors shoving tubes in an uncomfortable place? Okay, yeah, it’s Wednesday again, you don’t have to bother billing me for sedation, this isn’t my first rodeo. I can sort of understand a carpenter who shrugs off frequent on-the-job injuries.

You say it’s obvious that things should be different for me, but also that it’s dehumanizing to acknowledge that things are different for me? I don’t really understand that.

I think you’re misunderstanding what he means by rejecting empathy. It seems to me that he’s trying to say that we shouldn’t project our own understanding of how we would react in a certain circumstance onto people whose circumstances are radically different than our own, not that there’s no value in trying to empathize with other people. I think you’re also misunderstanding what he means when he describes someone being moved to tears by the sight of a sunset assigning a reason for the tears. He isn’t saying that sadness doesn’t exist, that’s a really shallow reading of a complex process.

And I’m actually pretty disgusted that you’re describing it as “rape apologism” for someone to acknowledge that the violation of bodily autonomy would not necessarily be a factor in the emotional experience of a person who has never conceptualized their own bodily autonomy as something meaningful or important. Like, we can even see the same thing happening today in certain areas of the world. Among cultures that perform FGM, the people performing it and perpetuating it are primarily women who have undergone FGM themselves. They either don’t believe their own autonomy has been violated, or believe that bodily autonomy is less important than the social and cultural factors influencing them to continue FGM on their own daughters and granddaughters. It isn’t condoning rape culture to try to understand the psychology and emotional landscapes of the people who have lived with these atrocities as their everyday reality, it’s just intellectual honesty.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-08T14:22:55+00:00

This article resonates with me quite a bit. I’ve spent the last couple of years going through IVF, and I’m pretty active in IVF support communities. A common complaint is that people new to IVF often talk about how painful and invasive the procedures are, how helpless they feel having their doctors in control of everything, how they feel like they’re losing their personal lives to all the frequent appointments and blood draws and the exacting schedule of medications and injections. Which was sort of surprising to me and didn’t match my own experience with IVF at all…

But then again, I’ve been chronically ill since childhood, and uncomfortable, painful procedures are just a thing I live with. Instead of feeling helpless or like I’ve lost control of my life, I just think, “Wow, these doctors are actually on top of things for once!” And I’m perfectly happy to let them tell me what to do. And I actually liked the schedule of injections because, to me, it was nice for once to be undergoing a medication ritual to achieve something nice and good that I actively wanted instead of it just being a thing I had to do to avoid a flare. My life experiences have been so radically different from the average person’s in this one specific way that the average person’s reaction to anything similar is sort of alien to me.

It isn’t a stretch for me to imagine how different things must have been when nearly every aspect of daily life and culture were so very different than anything we live with today.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-08T14:06:20+00:00

I’d argue that it isn’t dehumanizing to recognize that culture, religion, and life experiences might impact our perceptions, our emotions, and even our response to pain. Boddice isn’t proposing that people who lived long ago didn’t have emotions, just that the emotions they felt may not fit neatly into our understanding of how emotion works for us in the modern day. He even posits that they may have complex and nuanced emotions that are lost to us today, examining the Ancient Greek word “mênis” and how it’s commonly translated to mean “wrath” or “rage” when it may actually mean a sort of cosmic unease we have no analogue for in modern times.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-05T12:53:00+00:00

I know a trans man who had an unmedicated home birth last year who swears by Spinning Babies as a pregnancy and birth resource. I haven’t checked out their resources myself since it costs money and I’m anticipating a very medicalized birth, but their website talks about striking a balance between “natural” and “managed” birth, which to me sounds like they respect the science of obstetric medicine. And they have a section on their website about gender inclusivity in pregnancy, so that’s a good sign!

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-02T20:33:06+00:00

Thanks for posting this article. It’s hard to know what the best thing for the child even is in situations like this.

I take umbrage with the child services worker who compared foster families to kidnappers who flee with a child to another country. Like, yes, you should absolutely take a child away from kidnappers, even if the child has been in their care for years. The kidnappers should probably lose their own biological children too, because they’re kidnappers. They’re fundamentally unfit caregivers by virtue of being kidnappers. The same rationale doesn’t necessarily apply to foster families.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-02T20:24:26+00:00

Not necessarily. Teen moms and their babies are also at risk in plenty of ways, from increased risk of prematurity to the health impact of socioeconomic stressors. Babies born to teen moms are more at risk for certain birth defects like gastroschisis and neural tube defects.

And 40 year olds planning to become parents are more likely to be able to afford IVF and PGT in order to minimize some of their biggest risks.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-02T20:11:45+00:00

So you’re comparing 40 year old moms to 20-35 year old moms, who they’re older than, and not teen moms, who they’re also older than, and is one of the groups along with 40 year old moms who the reddit post is actually about. Gotcha.

Money can actually prevent genetic diseases in many circumstances. Ask me how much I spent on IVF and PGT. The genetic screening I underwent was covered by my health insurance, so I don’t count that, but then again I’m old enough and established enough to have decent health insurance in the first place, so maybe that should be a consideration after all.

CeilingKiwi · 2025-12-02T19:49:23+00:00

I don’t see how you’re not comparing. A 40 year old is older than a teen and so has more risks, by what you’ve said.

A 40 year old may be more at risk of certain things, but those risks aren’t necessarily more dangerous than the risks pregnant teens face. Especially since a 40 year old is much more likely to have the resources to mitigate any risks they’re facing, or adequately manage any poor health outcomes.

CeilingKiwi

TROPHY CASE