Hi ladies firstly happy new year! ive been on this site since my ectopic 2 years ago and its been so helpful the ladies are so understanding. Ill give you a brief on me. I suffered an ectopic over 2 years ago which resulted in my right tube been removed. After ttc aftr my ectopic i had a hsg test which showed my left tube partially blocked and i now need ivf. I need to pay privatley for my ivf as i have a nearly 6 year old. I will be having ivf sometime this year but i have so many questions. Ive tried to contact my gyno for information but she never answers her phone and my doctor says he doesnt know much ( some doctor eh) so i thought id post here also for other ladies wanting to ask questions or just for support.
My questions are how do i know what clinic to go to as i dont understand how the success rates are done. also do cysts affect ivf. Im so nervous and as im not getting support from doctors i thought id get my support here thankyou ladies x
Sorry to hear about your history - it sounds very similar to mine. I also only have one tube remaining but was told that the condition of it was likely to be pretty bad so no other option but IV, so can appreciate how tough it is when faced with that prospect.
In terms of choosing clinics, have you looked at the HFEA website? They have loads of info on there about each one? Also I know some of the clinics here do open evenings etc which are free to attend and you can usually chat to a fertility nurse as well. It could be an idea to do that to get a sense of what they are like. It is also worth considering locations as you will be spending a fair amount of time going back and forth so having somewhere that is an ok commute is important too.
As far as success rates go, I also find them quite confusing! Clinics often use different measures to make their success rates look good - so you might get a clinical pregnancy sucess rate (number of women who get a positive test after a cycle) but the real one I focused on was the live birth rate (number of ladies that went full term and had a baby). Often the clinical success rate can be higher and that can be the number they quote which can be misleading. This is because it doesn’t take into account chemical pregnancies and subsequent miscarriages.
I don’t know a huge amount about cysts, but I can tell you that both in my IVF fresh cycle and my frozen cycle, early monitoring scans picked up a cyst on my ovary. Neither doctor was concerned as they are apparently very common and in my fresh cycle, we went ahead anyway and in my frozen one, waited a month and then it was gone. I think the big issues for cysts is if your ovaries are polycystic.
Hope that is of some help to you and good luck with your research.
Angie thankyou for your reply it was really helpfull.
There arnt many clinics near me and the ones near me apparently arnt that good so im looking slightly further but not to far as it will become my second home :lol: the success rates are so confusing i really dont understand them at all. I think my main fear is it may not work which i know is a risk but im so terrified it wont work.
How did your cycles go? I dont have pcos just an odd cyst i get now and then.
Glad that my post was useful - please feel free to ask any qus you want and will try to help I remember very well how daunted I felt at the prospect of starting IVF.
Another thing that is worth thinking about in terms of your own chances of success (rather than at each clinic) is getting the preliminary tests done to see how you are doing. So getting your partner checked for sperm count :oops: and also you for your egg reserve. This will help give you a clearer picture of where you are at and I know when I had them done, it felt good to be starting out on the road. Also I can’t remember now, as I had my 1st cycle in Japan, but I think you need to get a number of standard blood tests done before you start (HIV/AIDS etc), so you might be able to get that done at your GP and save you some expenses. You might also want to think about each clinic’s protocols - how long they grow the embryos for, is it 2-3 days or can they take them to the blastocyst stage (5 days) and so on.
That is rubbish that your nearby clinics don’t have great records but maybe you can find one that is not too far. Out of interest, you can sometimes be a patient remotely and only travel to your main clinic for major appointments. You can then use other local clinics for monitoring scans etc if they will take outside patients. I have just done this with my frozen cycle, as I needed to use a clinic that could deal with the way my embryos had been frozen (in Japan they used a different technique for freezing them) and there were none in Scotland that could. So I was a patient with a London based clinic and travelled there twice, once for initial consultation and then for the transfer itself. All the other monitoring scans and so I have done here in Edinburgh through a local clinic. It does make things more complicated in terms of liaising with clinics and things and obviously the travel expense but I found it worked ok for me and meant that I could get the best possible clinic to deal with my embryos.
As for the two cycles I have done, the fresh one resulted in my wee boy and this current frozen one resulted in a BFP and am now 9 and a bit weeks pregnant (fingers crossed all works ok).
Regarding the cysts, if you get the odd one I don’t think it’s a big deal. They are apparently very common (I had no idea :roll: ) and the worst case scenario would be that it would delay your cycle for a month until it goes down and they would pick this up right at the start so you wouldn’t need to worry about getting half way through a cycle or anything. When I had mine in this current cycle, they delayed it for a month and said if I hadn’t gone at the first scan the following month, they would have put me on a contraceptive pill for a month to regulate everything, but it never came to that.
Wow angie congratulations on your little one and your bfp thats very promising. People have told me the main thing is to keep positive but because so many bad things have happend ive become a very negative person.
My partner had a test his is fine but ive not had my egg reserve checked yet but the clinic will do that when i go.
The clinic ive been looking at has a clinic an hour away from me where i go for consulatations and egg collection ect and they send me to another for tests which is closer by. My doctor seems to think i have a good chance as it is only my tubes standing in the way of me becoming pregnant.
At the moment im looking for a loan as it is very expensive and hopefully will be having ivf this year. Im very nervous but exited to. There isnt much support at all where i live so ive had to take it upon myself to do my own finding and research.
Ive just emailed a clinic abput blastocyst as ive heard you have a better chance with it but not sure if i have to have my first cycle of ivf first anf if fails do the blastocyst as my doctor said they dont normally do blastocyst unless i have a failed cycle. Im feeling better about ivf now i think its just the money sitiuation because i cant afford to keep paying for ivf and that scares me. Thanks again for your help and i hope you have a lovely pregnancy x
It’s funny I got told that before I started too, how important being positive was when facing IVF. A close friend of mine actually said that there wasn’t much point going into if you didn’t think it was going to work - so I kind of adopted that attitude. I knew it wouldn’t be easy, but I was determined that I would get there. I don’t know how much positive thinking can help, but every little counts
It sounds like you are quite well positioned to get started and am sure that your doctor is right in that you will have a strong chance of success, especially as you have already had one child. In terms of blastocysts etc, I think it varies from clinic to clinic. I have never heard of a clinic only doing it if you have a failed cycle. From the little research I have done, the success rates are higher with 5 day transfers than earlier so I considered that really important when choosing a clinic. I think when they are grown for 5 days there is more chance to assess which are the stronger/better embryos to put back and thus improve your chances. Also at 5 days, that is about the time the embryo would come into the womb in a natural pregnancy, so made sense to me that way too to replicate the timings.
Hope that you can get started soon and fingers and toes crossed you will get a lovely BFP soon
Hi angie i think i will to adopt that positive attitude as you said every little helps and im willing to do whatever it takes. Youve been really helpful and i hope you have a great pregnancy and a gorgeous baby at the end xx
I remember very well how daunted I felt at the prospect of starting IVF.