Infertility is such a difficult thing to go through. Disappointment, grief, frustration, fear: by the time you seek expert advice, your emotions have probably already been through the wringer. Somehow, you summoned the courage to ask for help, submit to testing, and undergo treatment, but it’s not working. When all of this emotion and effort is met with more disappointment, where do you turn next?
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The buzz about elective egg freezing keeps growing, but public opinion is still split. Half the articles you see on the subject champion egg freezing as a huge leap forward in choice, freedom, and equality for women. The other half seem to raise serious questions about how effective the procedure is and whether the success rates make it worthwhile. If you do make the decision to freeze your eggs, how likely is it to pay off in a healthy baby when you’re ready?
In the quest to get pregnant and bring home a healthy baby, many infertility patients are eager to explore every option that might give them an edge. Complimentary treatments and therapies such as massage, nutritional counselling and supplements, chiropractic adjustments and elements of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) are often suggested as additions to conventional medical and surgical fertility treatments like IUI and IVF. Acupuncture in particular is commonly recommended, but does it work and should you consider trying it?
Education and awareness are some of our most powerful weapons in the fight against cervical cancer, but this is a topic that doesn’t get a lot of attention. When’s the last time you gave your cervix a second thought?
When you’ve taken the big step of scheduling an appointment with a fertility specialist, emotions are probably running high. You’ve been carrying the weight of loss, disappointment and anxiety for months or even years. Somehow, through all of that, you’ve found the strength to act and the courage to hope.
You’re looking for answers, which can be scary, especially when you’re not entirely sure what questions to ask beyond the most obvious one of “how can I have the baby I’ve been dreaming of?” When you’re face to face with your fertility doctor for the first time, it can be a little overwhelming, and suddenly all the queries you rehearsed on the way there have deserted you.
We’re here to help. These ten questions will give you an excellent start to your fertility treatment journey.
For many fertility patients, frozen embryos provide a backup plan and the opportunity to further build their families after a successful IVF cycle. After the fertility medications and ovarian stimulation, after the egg retrieval process, and after fertilization in the lab, a patient undergoing IVF may learn that they have more viable embryos than they need to transfer in one cycle. In most cases, your doctor will select one (or maybe two) high quality embryos for a fresh embryo transfer, in order to reduce the chances of a risky multiple pregnancy. The remainder of the embryos can be frozen and stored for later use.
When you make the decision to freeze your eggs, you offer your future self an opportunity to plan pregnancy on your terms and your timeline. While there are no guarantees in medicine—or in life—egg freezing (also known as oocyte cryopreservation) is the best option available for women who know they want to get pregnant someday and want to slow the biological countdown clock. Whether you’re just mulling the idea over or know for sure that egg freezing is for you, you are likely to have some questions. One of the most common queries about egg freezing is how many eggs should you freeze to give yourself the best chance of success in the future?
If you are having trouble conceiving naturally and look for help from fertility expert, the first stage is to undergo a series of fertility tests. Your fertility expert will be looking for signs of the underlying cause of your infertility, because every good treatment plan begins with an accurate diagnosis. For many patients, receiving the results of these tests is a source of mixed emotions. It is exciting and hopeful to finally get some answers, but it can also be confusing to enter a new world of medical terminology, statistics, and science. If the results do show a problem, it can be frightening to wonder what they mean for your dreams of having a baby. One of the most common and most important tests your doctor is likely to order is a blood test to measure your FSH level. When the test comes back with elevated FSH levels, it is common to have a whole new set of questions. Here’s what you need to know.
Recurrent or repeated implantation failure (RIF) can be devastating. Some patients undergo three or more rounds of IVF and everything seems to go well: a good number of eggs at retrieval, a good fertilization rate, the embryos appear to be healthy and high quality, the uterine lining looks good, the transfer goes smoothly, but the pregnancy never “sticks.”
When a woman is born, her ovaries already hold all the potential eggs she will have in her lifetime. Over the years, many of these eggs are lost through natural cell death and through a process called atresia, where roughly 15 to 20 immature follicles in the ovaries “compete” to mature and release an egg during ovulation. All the unsuccessful follicles are reabsorbed into the body. This process accelerates as we age, until the ovaries stop releasing eggs and we enter menopause.
