to ask if IUI ever works for anyone ever?

[everwork]

Feeling discouraged when looking at the success rates

Bump for the lunchtime crowd

Hi, I had IUI after tubal surgery and a course of Clomid, my twins turn 16 in November! I was very lucky!

Worked first time for a friend of mine after years of infertility secondary to PCOS.

It did for a friend of mine but she also went on to conceive naturally afterwards so possibly her fertility issues were on the less severe side of things.

It worked for me. Twice!

First time after months of unexplained infertility and lots of tests. It was suggested me try IUI before we went on the IVF waiting list. I took Clomid and we got pregnant at the first IUI. Done through the NHS.

The second time we went private and paid £700 for IUI. Stats at the clinic were terrible. For my age (39) the stats were basically a 0% success rate. Again I got pregnant first attempt. No clomid that time.

So it does work. I have no idea how it always worked with IUI and never when we just tried the old fashioned way.

My children are 7 and 3 now.

I had 2 rounds of failed iui. Did diui for genetic reasons - everything looked perfect but it didn’t work. Fell pregnant naturally with twins 3 months later. If I had to do it again I would have gone straight to ivf. Good luck!

We did IUI for our first -- took seven cycles but there were additional mitigating factors on the first six which were not discovered until after those first six failed.

Those additional factors impact success rates for sure; they are things that would not have impacted IVF.

Sure it can.

But it's so varied it's not really helpful to look at raw stats, because people do IUI in so many different situations. Our clinic quoted IUI successes for women aged 35 and under as being around 1 in 10 (which isn't very different from your chances of getting pregnant naturally, though that's usually quoted in terms of the numbers of couples who get pregnant within the year).

But that 1 in 10 includes lots of different people - it includes people like my DP, who has no known fertility issues and got pregnant first time around with a very low dose of stimulants; it includes women who don't use any stimulants; it also includes people like me, who do have known fertility issues and who know it's a long shot.

The basic reason for doing IUI if you know you have fertility issues is that it's cheaper and less invasive than IVF. But it's really easy to feel crushed that it doesn't happen straight away.

For me, it helps to remember that it's perfectly normal not to conceive straight away from ordinary sex, so though it feels awful when you pay for IUI and it doesn't work out, it's not necessarily a sign the procedure doesn't work.

Btw, there is an amazing and very active community of people doing fertility treatment on instagram - I wish I'd known about it when I started. I bet if you search for IUI as a hashtag you'll get some success stories to cheer you up.

Thanks all x

I had three failed rounds with no known fertility issues. But I know of two people who have had success twice with it.

Worked for me first time, my son is now 10 weeks old.