Hi Ladies:
Just to put my two cents and I hope it helps you both as I have had the same predicament. Even if one has a lot of money to spend IVF is not cheap. Here in CA, we paid $11,500.00 (all out of pocket) for two tries and it does not include the medication and other additional services such as ICSI, Assisted Hatching or PGD. I have kids from prior relationship and my clinic told me about this compassionate program and I ended up paying zero for my first try. However my first try was not successful.
In my first attempt, I had 11 eggs retrieved, 4 fertilized and two matured. we transferred 2 grade AA embryos to me both 5day blast, the embryologist even bet on me that she will be surprised if I don't get pregnant. She said that my embryos were so beautiful that she didn't even do assisted hatching. I don't have any problems, in this attempt to conceive, my hubby has low count and motility..so ICSI should have taken care of that right? wrong...
After my failed attempt that's when I became vigilant and read more about IVF as well as implantation success of reproductive clinics. What I did different on my second attempt was - I slowed down on my workouts (I do crossfit, bootcamp and marathon) and rest more. Heck I even took a three week vacation in Europe to bring down my stress level. days before the retrieval and transfer, I had body massages and even had a two hour massage the night before the day of my transfer. Also, an hour before the transfer I took valium to calm my nerves and made my body more receptive ( btw the valium was prescribed by my RE, I didn't took it in my first IVF attempt).
On this IVF#2, they harvest 11 eggs, 10 fertilized and three(3) matured, 1AA, 1A, 1B. I was devastated because again, I have no blast to freeze which means I should better get pregnant or this is it. This time, the embryologist did assisted hatching, ICSI and I demanded that they transfer all three to me. I was going to ask for four (4) actually but I only have three. They agreed because of the fact that I have a failed attempt.
I wasn't truly expecting that I will get pregnant let alone with twins because 5days after my transfer (they are 5days blast anyway), not counting the day of my transfer, I POAS and it was negative (I even bought the most expensive clearblue) - I was so upset and took solace to the fact that I already have two daughters anyway. I didn't even want to go to my beta anymore but my husband insisted. In these days when I was advised not to lift more than 10lbs or do any high impact activities, because I thought that I was not pregnant..I was back to running, doing 4-6 miles and wrestling and jumping with my dogs.
I was shocked to learn that I was pregnant after two betas, the first beta was 35 and then two days after it was 104..it's not a great number but it doubled. Then after three weeks, I got another surprise that it was twins. The doctor saw two sacs and was initially thinking that the other one was probably empty but after measuring Baby A at 140 HR, he was surprised that Baby B also has a strong HR 126 at 7 weeks. So this my story.
If you want to up the chances I would strongly recommend to having rest your body and your mind; some couple would even do acupuncture. Also, look into Assisted Hatching. I didn't do PGD because you will pay for this prior to transfer but there's no guarantee that the transferred egg will implant. There are so many factors.
and yes the price is great and the statistics are comparable. I wonder how much the statistics mean though? There are some clinics with really high success rates, should we put much trust into those statistics though?
