We confronted male infertility the first time we tried to conceive. My husband was identified as the problem. He had surgery. Five months later I got pregnant naturally. I have a five year old daughter. Since then we’ve been through multiple attempts at IVF with no luck other than a single positive that did not last. I apparently have eggs that are aging more rapidly than the rest of me, a fact I find incredibly difficult to cope with. We are gearing up for IVF number 4 in January. I’m only trying because it is actually covered under our medical insurance.
When it works that’s great. When it doesn’t be prepared for a whole lot of hurt. The process itself is exhausting and unpleasant. You may get lucky. If the problem is male factor that can often be corrected with techniques they use. If the problem is the uterine environment that’s also fairly easy to correct. If the problem is an egg problem well the odds are really stacked against you. That’s basically the one problem current technology cannot really correct.
Honestly, I found reading about IVF much more scary than just doing it. The first time I gave myself a shot, I took five minutes or so to stare at the needle in horror, but by the third one I could do it in my sleep. (Good thing, too, because I’m now giving myself sub-Q shots for life, or at least until someone comes up with an oral therapy that works for MS.) I had secondary infertility - I got pregnant with no problem five years ago, but it was much tougher the second time around.
We were successful on the first round, but even within that there were ups and downs - put on pause because I had a mysterious brand-new cyst as we’re getting ready to start (bad), allowed to continue because the cyst is not producing estrogen (good), then my FSH was way higher than it had been a few months ago (bad), but follicles are growing (good). We thought we had 12 or 13 good looking follicles at trigger (good), but at retrieval, it turned out that many were endometriomas (bad). We got six eggs (eh), five of those fertilized (good), all five made it to day 3 (very good). We transferred the two best (good), and cultured the other three. One made it to blastocyst and was frozen (not bad). Waiting for a pregnancy test is excruciating at this point, but I did get pregnant with a singleton (hurrah!). Then I had placenta previa (bad, and associated with IVF, although it’s still relatively rare), and spent 9 weeks on hospital bed rest (very bad). Baby spent week in NICU for breathing issues (bad), but is now fat and happy (the best - all worth it).