To wonder why IVF is often referred to as 'gruelling'

[daysayso]

This post isn't to undermine anyone who thinks it's tough but I'm asking because I am considering it in the coming months and despite doing research I can't see what makes it so tough?

Im not saying it isn't tough btw but genuinely wanting to know what makes it so hard?

Im not talking about the emotional aspect of it and the possibility of it not working as I know about that but the logistics of it - is it painful? Ignoring the emotional aspect what makes it so hard?

Thanks in advanced

The injections, the hormones, the invasive scans, the endless back and forth from the hospital, the waiting and waiting and waiting between each step. The practicalities with work and needing time off for appointments. The "death by a thousand cuts" when yet another colleague, friend or sister announces a pregnancy or when adverts for follow on milk come on television, or when you see a mother in the street yelling at her child and think what you wouldn't give to be in her place.

After my egg retrieval I suffered from ovarian hyper-stimulation syndrome, I don't think it's overly common but worth considering. It put me in hospital on morphine for about 4 days with excruciating stomach pain, due to my ovaries swelling so much and and leaking into my system. My fresh cycle was cancelled and I did frozen from there on.

You also need a very supportive partner or family network. My 10 year relationship ended up breaking down due to the pressure of it and me feeling like I was going it alone, although in retrospect I'm sure my partner at the time felt a bit helpless with what he could really do. It just didn't feel important enough to him and I grew to resent him. You need to really want it, and if you have a partner they have to really want it (or want it for you) too.

Tonnes of appointments. Jabbed with needles. Internal examinations. People scraping at your womb lining with no anesthetic. Mild ovarian over stimulation causing huge bloating. Millions of pills and pesaries every day. The hormone changes up and down. The waiting. The full bladder for appointments. Its gruelling before you even talk about the emotional side. Our odds were good and we were successful early on so I'm glad we did it. If you have low odds, think twice.

The round leading to fresh embryo transfer was brutal and ended in a very early miscarriage.

For the frozen transfer round, it wasn’t as bad but at one point I was taking 3 different meds in 3 different ways (pill, spray, pessary) multiple times at different times of day, I had loads of reminders pinging on my phone all day, I had to do something like pessary at 7am lie down for half an hour, pill at 8am, nasal spray at 9am, pill at 12pm, pill at 4pm, pessary at 7pm lie down for half an hour, pill at 8pm, nasal spray at 9pm all whilst working and going to hospital appointments every few days for scans, my hormones were everywhere I was leaking pessary goo all over my underwear I couldn’t go anywhere in the evening due to pessary timing etc. Emotionally so difficult. But that transfer resulted in my amazing DD, so lucky and so worth it.

Recommend the podcasts big fat negative and for trying out loud which talk about the process.

I suppose it's the hormones and the unknown. I had ivf and didn't find it gruelling at all. For me it was two injections a day and a nasal spray. Was neither up nor down. Granted it worked first time.

You need to want it for you, not your partner. I found it gruelling. It was pre chemotherapy so a time limit on how long I had to get through. The waiting around, multiple scans, daily hospital visits and blood tests. The number of injections you have to give yourself when your thighs get all knotted and you can’t get the needles in. The sheer number of people who see you with your legs in stirrup!
Then post cancer treatment, the ups and downs and the sheer joy of it working only to miscarry and they gave no support. In fact the only way I found out about the early pregnancy unit was through A and E and the early pregnancy unit said we should have been given to them as soon as we got a positive.
It was gruelling for me as you have no control, it takes up all your time and every waking thought. If you go through with it best of luck.

Never had it but I was always assumed people were talking about the emotional/mental toll rather than physical when they said it was grueling

Are you deliberately being obtuse?
If you cant possibly understand why ivf could be hard, then im not sure if you are ready for process nor the end goal...

Are you deliberately being rude?

Not everyone struggles with IVF, so I can see why the op might want to ask this before undertaking the process.

So...among other things:
You are put on an artifically induced menopause to bring your body to a neutral state before they fire up the fertility, so they can control it. So that's a mini menopause with papery skin, saggy jowels, swollen belly every time you do it.

You have emotional swings due to hormone spikes.

You have to inject yourself every day for weeks.

It costs a fortune.

All around you people are getting pregnant through having sexm which is a whole lot more fun. And free.

It costs a fortune.

You have to keep getting time off work for appointments, so people start to think of you as flaky.

Yoru partner never quite understands what you are enduring. I nearly divorced mine when he said he might not turn up to the egg collection - a long and painful procedure. And when he bought himself a big steaming coffee on the way to hospital on a freezing day when I was having yet another jeffing procedure and nil by mouth due to him being infertile.

You have to keep opening your legs to have total strangers poke around in there. For me this was absolutely the worst aspect. It felt like a violation.

And after all this, you get a dull back ache and a bleed. So all those missed nights out because you were injecting, and sore bruised legs, bums, stomachs from injecting and all those thousands of pounds, and all those mood swings and rows and shreds of hope have to be relived all over again for the next cycle. meanwhile the news always seems to be full of people horrifically abusing their natural born childrena nd you just want to scream at the injustice.

But apart from that it's not gruelling at all! 😀

You say you’re asking this so that you can decide if it’s worth it. Honestly, if you have to ask that then I don’t think it will be worth it for you.

Yes, I'm not sure what response one could ever expect from that question.

Emotions all over the place from the drugs. Complete roller coaster. Constant appointments, internal examinations, blood work. Total exhaustion from which I never recovered. Daily injections, twice daily after a couple of days then. gooey pessaries. Everything carefully planned and timed. Crazy schedule. Egg extraction planned for any time day or night with military precision: be at the hospital at x time or the eggs will release themselves and the cycle ruined.

The wait to see if the eggs fertilise. The endless wait to see if the embryos stick. All the prospective mums sat in a queue waiting for their blood test to determine if they’ve reached the next hurdle. Then the pregnancy itself. At first, after everything I went through, don’t dance, don’t move a muscle in case the embryo detaches. The pregnancy then hard on the body and I decided eventually my body was too weak and never was supposed to fall pregnant. I have a dd but not good health.

Also had the examination of the lining with no pain relief as well as egg collection through local vaginal injection only. I am one of the unlucky few for whom the anaesthetic takes 10 minutes extra to work so 50% of the collection on my first cycle was without pain relief. Twisted ovary damaged from the treatment, needing surgery to correct.

That is a very fair observation.

I donated eggs many years ago and I found that alone gruelling physically. I cannot imagine how tough it must be with the added emotional stuff on top.

The invasive examinations, the drugs, injecting yourself. The egg retrieval was very painful and the recovery wasn't a walk in the park.

I consider myself a fairly tough person but IVF in May was one of the worst things I've ever put myself through. I didn't have the emotional impact really but my body physically suffered.

On the lowest dose possible with no PCOS my body produced 45 eggs. My ovaries were the size of grapefruits. My morning injection was okay but my night time ones made me routinely cry. Then the egg retrieval was brutal. Then the injections for the frozen transfer (which ended up ectopic and could've killed me) were like being kicked in the arse by a horse.

Everybody's different. I have 20 embryos frozen from one round so don't need to do it again but I wouldn't do it again even if you paid me £50,000.

This exactly.
The success rate is so low - you'd never gamble huge amounts of money and mental emotion on anything else which only has a success rate of 32% at best.

Its the sheer number of appointments I found gruelling. There are ALOT of appointments - to go through forms, ID, education sessions about what it involves, a mandatory counselling session (at our clinic at least), tests, paperwork, education sessions for how to administer the drugs and then visits to the clinic to pick up the drugs etc. etc.... Scheduling all of this around work was quite tricky, especially if you don't want them to know you're having time off for IVF!

It was a lot of brain-work to learn how to inject yourself / when to do it / how many pills in a day to take...when to time the crucial "trigger" injections. A lot of responsibility placed in the patient's own hands. When you're sat alone in your living room about to inject yourself in the leg with a potion you've mixed yourself it is easy to doubt yourself - "have I mixed it right? Is it definitely the right time to take it? What if I miss a dose by accident? Am I using the right needle?" - You need a big note book to remember all the instructions!

The side effects of egg collection for me included needing a week off work and having constipation for over a week. That was the worst bit. And the worry beforehand about if it would hurt / how much I would feel when under sedation (as it was, it felt like a general anaesthetic and I dont remember a thing). I cried in a lot of theatre rooms - more so due to the anxiety and worry of what procedures would feel like, rather than them actually being that bad.

All worth it though, of course, if it works. (I was very lucky)

On your second paragraph did your clinic not go through this with you?

I had tutorial on how to do the injections, was called 10 mins prior to needing to take my trigger, didn't have to think about it at all.

So your hormones get turned off = instant menopause symptoms... so already your body is in weird hormonal state. Then with lots of injections (that hurt) you get put into a hormonal accelerator, designed to bring on as many eggs as possible, a weird unnatural roller coaster of emotions. Depending on whether or not eggs mature you give yourself a trigger injection at a very specific time, you undergo sedation to have the eggs harvested. You wait anxiously to see how many they get, whether they fertilise, whether they divide, whether they are a good quality blastocyst. You're on tenderhooks for about 5 days to see if it works, then longer to see if you're pregnant, then longer to check the baby is OK.

And through this you are poked, prodded, scanned, attend endless appointments and expected to carry on with your normal life. Overlay on this years of TTC , people falling pregnant around you, never knowing if this will work, acting like a crazy woman over all kinds of things both big and small, wondering if you will every reclaim your body. You can't plan anything as you never know what will happen, your focus becomes drawn into this tiny universe and you don't have a clear head to deal with it all because your body never knows what on earth it's supposed to be doing.

But is it worth it? 100% because the alternative is not being a mother, not having your family and not believing you tried everything to make it happen.

Jesus Christ.

Do some research, read some threads, and then quit with the goady posts @daysayso

I found it a lot easier than infertility

I didn’t find IVF hard. More just…inconvenient and costly. But I have 2 kids now (only one round of ivf - my other kid was a frozen embryo transfer from the same batch). I think experience is coloured by success or failure and how many attempts it takes.

The gruelling part for me was the emotional side. The 9 weeks of injections (my body didn't down regulate as it should have which messed with my head as my body couldn't get pregnant and it also wouldn't react to the drugs!) didn't bother me, the scans didn't bother me (the results of the scans did), during egg collection I felt very relaxed (thanks meds!) and enjoyed my cup of coffee and toast afterwards (the waiting for the phone calls for how many eggs fertilised did!) then the wait for embryo transfer, the 2 week wait and knowing it hadn't worked before I had the blood test results messed with my head!

I remember after my 6th round of IVF having a miscarriage at 15 weeks. It happened at the weekend. I couldn't even take the Monday off work, since I needed to "save" my days off for future rounds of IVF. That was tough.

After my 9th IVF round, I had another miscarriage while preparing for a job interview the next day. I had the miscarriage and then had to go straight back to my desk to stud/prepare. The prior week, I remember injecting myself with IVF meds in the toilets of a prospective company after doing an interview!

Finally in my 10th round I had lovely twins.
It took 7 years in all. So that's a lot of time to put your life on hold and live constantly on a knife-edge of will it/won't it ever work. That's the bit I found most grueling.