AIBU to flex the truth on how long we've been trying

[mariannaf]

The older you get the longer, on average, for the average person, it should take to conceive, right? So why is it that couples over 35 have to wait a shorter amount of time before the docs will seriously consider helping them?

Let's say 2 couples have been trying for 6 months. One couple is 40 years old and the other is 25 years old. At 25yrs the average couple who are healthy would (probably) conceive before 6months and the fact that they haven't might indicate that there's an issue. Whereas at 40 the average may be above 6 months, and certainly longer average time at 40 than at 25, so the fact they haven't might mean they haven't been trying long enough. So why would the docs be willing to help the 40y.o but not 25y.o?

The reason I'm asking all this - we've been trying 5mo and so far no luck. We would be going via the private route anyway whether we go after 12 months or now, so is it worth flexing the truth a little and going to a private fertility clinic already for IVF or other treatments? I feel like even at private clinics, when we are happy to pay and not use NHS funds, they would stick with the 6mo vs 12mo rule because it is policy. We are 29 (me) and 34 (him). We've done sperm testing - he has borderline low sperm motility (29%) and borderline low sperm morphology (3%). We've also checked my uterus, fallopian tubes, done hormone testing on me - all fine. He is taking supplements

It’s not clear what you want from this thread. People are sharing their experiences and you are brushing them off. It seems you have your mind set on IVF so why continue replying and posting 🤷‍♀️

please don’t consider this. We were fortunate not to need IVF in the end (we were on waiting list) but we came very close. 3 years TTC from age 25. I did have surgery for endometriosis and pcos (ovarian drilling) in the end but that was due pain as much as the fertility side. We conceived 6 weeks after my surgery, between Xmas and new year after too many gins (I’d thought sod it after being so good for so long).

my friend wants to do what you’re suggesting and I’ve told her to be more patient. Fertility treatments are not fun. At your age and with time on your side, stop obsessing if you can, perhaps have some counselling about it- I let it take over my life in hindsight!

we’ve been trying for baby 2 for over a year now and I’m still in no rush to “push the nuclear button” and get referred. My mental health was screwed last time, and we were fortunate to not need the IVF so I cannot even begin to imagine how hard the PPs on this thread suffered. Don’t inflict that on yourself voluntarily- sex 3 times a week through your cycle. I won’t tell you to “just relax” though, as that used to annoy me when people said it

We actively tried for 2 years and conceived (baby stuck) at 28 years old.

We had 3 losses along the way. It was only at that point we were offered help. The help we were given was checking our fertility. All came back normal and we were left to it. They said we would meet the doctor again if another year had passed with no luck. We were also offered progesterone if we wanted to but took doctors advice not to ask for the prescription just yet. 2 months later we conceived naturally and baby stuck without it. 🙂

You can speak with your doctor if you want but the likelihood they will be able to do much is pretty low at 5 months.

Have you tried putting a pillow under your bottom after sex to let gravity help the sperm get to where they need to go?

I saw Dr Chris say this on This Morning. He also said, don't go to the loo after sex. Obvious I know but just thought I would mention it as it helped us

I think at your age you're doing everything you can. IVF is so brutal, I would try everything you can before going down this route

I’m almost 38 and currently 5 months pregnant with my first. It took us almost a year.

As other folks have said, 5 months isn’t a long time. But I know how impatient I got.

You can do the blood tests yourself through medichecks, Randox etc cheaply to check your hormone levels are correct and that you’re ovulating, FSH is correct, and get scans for a follicle count. You don’t need a referral for any of that or to even see a doctor to understand the results.

My DH had similar sperm count levels as yours and one thing we were told was that sex every day was too much. They need time to regenerate. There’s a reason why they tell them to avoid ejaculation for days before a sperm test. Both the doctor who did his sperm sample and my gynae said the same thing. So don’t think that SMEP or loads and loads of sex is the way necessarily.

OP I hear your frustration. As others are saying, 5 months isn’t long. We fell pregnant immediately on starting trying and I miscarried I was 32. We were then trying for 2 years, and had testing and were referred for IVF as husbands count was low. It was AWFUL. Waiting 2 years. Doing ovulation tests. Awful. Then when we were referred, the pressure came off. It was Christmas. We stopped the organic food and ate and drank what we wanted. And I fell pregnant naturally ahead of the first IVF appointment. I had DS1 at 35 and we have since had two babies! The second was 6 months of trying and the 3rd was a surprise!!

I echo what the others are saying. 5 months is too short a time. But I feel for you. Sending love.

Oh, forgot to mention. I also had an HSG privately. It has a side effect of increasing chance of pregnancy for 3 months, I got pregnant the month after. Maybe coincidence though. I had to get referred for that through a gynae- they might not do that for you just yet.

So selfish paying for yourself to do your own medical treatment, isn't it?!

No, my mind isn't set on IVF but if someone assumes something incorrect like "your holiday was ruined" I'd correct them.

Very willing to hear people's experiences, it's why I posted and I am listening.

You've been trying for 5 months at 29, have already had sperm counts done and are considering lying to get early IVF? I would suggest that perhaps the biggest issue right now is probably your stress levels. You really need to relax more.

@mariannaf
At 29 and him 34 it can take healthy couples up to 2 years, i first fell at 34 had 4 miscarriages up till 37 then had my rainbow at 39, 5m is no time, cause after 35 your fertility declines that's why they give you 6m then referre you, I was seen at the fertility clinic was about to start ivf when I fell, I was also seen by a recurrent miscarriage consultant who put a plan in place if I fell pregnant again, when I did I was given progesterone put on aspirin, don't through money down the drain just yet.

It can take your body a while to get used to not using contraceptive.
Give some time for your body to find its natural cycle again.

I do think 5 months isn’t any time to try.

Give yourself time and IVF is a tough journey & puts an awful lot of pressure on a relationship. My sister has been trying for a few years and then tried IVF which they then sadly lost - she has been very affected by the IVF process - hormones & intrusive process. Her relationship has suffered and they’ve actually paused IVF due to the impact to her & them.

Not read the full thread but we had this situation in terms of low sperm motility etc in our late 30s. As soon as DH started the supplements (proxeed) we conceived pretty quickly. So give it a bit of time to work.

I think lying would be wrong.

You have, potentially, another decade of fertility and therefore time to take a more watchful approach. Compare that to a woman who just met her life partner at 38 and is now trying to get pregnant at 39, knowing that her time is running out, quickly. This is obvious, surely.

I had my first child at 32. We had been trying for about a year (missed 2 or 3 cycles for various reasons). I got pregnant exactly 12 months after we started ttc. We had no issues-it was just one of those things. I do remember crying over a negative test or when I got my period. The longing was awful, but it did happen naturally within the time frame.

Two more children conceived after that. One on first cycle, the other on the second.

Tbh reading your replies I think you have made your mind up so it doesn’t really matter what people say. I understand being completely desperate for a child as I still am now despite being successful with one. I went through 7 years of fertility treatment and it was horrendous. The impact it has on your mental health and well-being is horrible. I was on a forum for fertility throughout and it’s heartbreaking how many woman go through this and even sadder that (me included) cling to the success of others in hope in means it will work for us too. I’m one of the lucky ones not only did i successfully conceive but my marriage survived. So many of these women regardless of success or not lost their husbands in the process because it is all consuming. It’s not just about the lie which is bad enough, regardless of paying or not, it’s the desperation to go down a route so early on that can have a drastic impact on your health and marriage. I wouldn’t wish infertility on my worst enemy and I understand how hard it is to watch everyone get pregnant around me, but seriously consider if this is the best thing to jump into when these rules are in place for a reason.

Because if you have subfertility, rather than infertility, you can potentially save yourselves the best part of £15k by trying for a bit longer.

Lots of people have subfertility. I know many people who ended up pregnant after 6+ months of trying. Myself included, three times - I am much happier having that £45k to spend on a house deposit.

You know your DH has a low sperm count, but it isn’t zero, so you could potentially get pregnant (Ie you have subfertility as well). Have lots of sex before and after your ovulation date.

Blimey OP, you need to calm down.

I’d been trying for a year when I went to the GP. He ran basic tests but the best thing he told me was to try to stop thinking about it.

It worked.

If you’re this anxious TTC then how on earth are you going to get through 9 months without worrying about a miscarriage or disability. Then the child’s lifetime of worries.

Sort out your anxiety first and your whole life can be so much easier.

There’s just something very entitled about your posts here OP. I hope you don’t actually struggle to conceive (you’re barely 5 minutes in the ttc door if you’ve only been trying 5 months). But if you DO struggle and you’re still trying in a year, you’ll hopefully realise how entitled and insensitive you sound.

I think OP needs more than acupuncture if we're being honest.

@mariannaf OP I've read through the thread and have noticed you're predominantly replying to people you think hold the golden ticket ("what supplements did you take?", "is getting drunk a method?"), rather than acknowledging the difficult but very real advice many people are trying to offer you. This is more of the latter.

Please go and get help with your mental struggles before you try any further to conceive. This anxiety is not going to magically disappear for you to live happily ever after if you get pregnant, believe me it will just manifest in other ways instead. Pregnancy is hard. Labour is hard. Recovery from both is hard. Having a newborn/baby/toddler/etc is hard. The sleep deprivation, the relationship changes, the list is almost endless. I understand TTC is hard too, but it is not the peak of the mountain by any stretch of the imagination. There are plenty of people who have endured the IVF journey only to go on and develop PND and feel confused by why their long sought after child isn't making them feel full of joy as they imagined.

Your biggest problem really isn't conception right now.

Hang on - I think you've misunderstood what those time spans are for.

It's usually 12 months under 35 / 6 months over 35 - this is to trigger an investigation into what's going wrong. Because you can't just run fertility tests on every member of the population who is impatient because they didn't get pregnant the first couple of months of trying, so there has to be some kind of criteria to meet first.

But that's not your situation, you already know that your DH has low sperm motility and morphology. So if I understand correctly, you should be able to access an appointment to discuss options (even if you are not advised to go straight to IVF). That's not what the 6/12 month wait is for.

But to answer your original question:

The reason you get longer to try when you're younger is that assuming totally normal fertility, you only have about a 20% chance of conception per cycle, so it's normal for it to take a bit of time/a few attempts to conceive - the average is about 3-4 months (4 months is when it tips over to more than 50% chance). After 6 months you're at 74% (roughly) chance of pregnancy, but 11 months is the 91st centile, which is probably just rounded up to 12 for ease. So for 1 in 4 couples, even though they aren't pregnant by the 6th month it doesn't mean that they WON'T get pregnant, it just means that they have to wait a little bit longer. There is some quite significant randomness - you know when you're playing a board game and you really really NEED to roll a 6 but sometimes it can seem to be ages and so many turns before you get one? And then some lucky bugger on the other side of the board keeps rolling 6s and they don't even need one. It's kind of exactly like that - 1/6 isn't far off the probability of conceiving and then not miscarrying.

At 5 months trying, assuming normal fertility there's only about a 67% chance you'll have conceived. So for 1 in every 3 couples it takes longer than 5 months. That's very common - you are likely just in that 1 in 3 (or 3 of 10) and 2 out of those 3-in-10 will have conceived naturally by 11 months.

If you're younger, you HAVE time to wait and you can afford to say OK let's just try a bit longer, it is quite likely that we've had a crap roll of the dice. (And even up to 12 months doesn't necessarily mean that something is wrong, but it does mean you've been trying for longer than most people have to try, so it's absolutely worth investigating.)

If you're older, you MIGHT not have as much time to wait, the referral, waiting time, process of doing all the tests on both partners, waiting for results, appointment to discuss results, then yet more trying with whatever method is suggested, first pregnancy might not be successful and may need to try again - this all takes time, and in the meantime, you're both getting older. So they kickstart the process after a shorter period of time, even though there's still a chance nothing is wrong, because you DON'T have loads of time to just wait around trying naturally, and also because of age there is an increased chance of issues anyway so the bar is lower to check.

Someone in their 20s or early 30s does have time on their side. I would ask about the possibility of an NHS appointment to discuss the results you've had (if you haven't had that already) but in the meantime, keep trying, because it's really not that unlikely that the odds will come up for you at some point. And if you have a condition where the result is that it's possible, but less likely, then actually one way to handle that is just to give it more time. This has the benefits of avoiding all the invasive, painful, and risky parts of IVF as well. My DH has a chromosome translocation, which basically causes genetic defects but these can occur at various stages of development depending on where the break in the chromosome is - for us it seems to cause it so early that I either miscarry or the embryo never implants, which IMO is the easiest version of this to cope with. (As we have been lucky not to have to cope with TFMR, later miscarriages, PGD IVF, difficult decisions.) It took us about 15 months to conceive DS2 and then after he was born we decided not to use any contraception and DS3 came along exactly three years later. (DS1 has a different dad.) Some people use IVF with our condition but we felt that we were lucky to be able to just wait and see.

And BTW, worrying or not isn't going to make your DH's sperm swim any differently, so worry away (or at least, don't beat yourself up/worry about worrying!!)

To go back to the stats/probability - I found this reassuring, it isn't for everyone -

If for example you had half the chances of a couple with totally normal fertility, then you still hit over 50% chance by month 7, 75% chance by month 14. And if your DH's sperm count is only borderline for investigation then you probably don't have half the chances, it's probably somewhere higher than this.

But essentially what I'm saying is that the fact you've been trying for 5 months with no results is not yet a reason to stress or automatically assume that it will never happen. It is likely that you just need more attempts. Think about playing that board game where you're really really desperate for a 6. It usually arrives in the end!

Lastly (totally unstatistical, unscientific advice) - try a cock ring. It's meant to make the ejaculation stronger so it shoots further. Could have been total coincidence, and apologies because this is TMI, but it worked for us with DS2.

Good luck!

Having had a close friend going through IVF, you need to exhaust all other methods before going down this route, particularly if the issue is with your DH. Egg harvesting, the daily injections with hormones and after effects of getting ‘pumped up’ hoping an embryo will implant and then it not happening… they’re getting about 3/4 chances per year. So you’re much better off, Statistically, keeping at it the natural method. 5 months isn’t much. It took us about 8 months between our children. Have you come off hormonal contraception?

IVF is extremely mentally and physically gruelling. Why would you rush to put yourself through all that potential trauma when you might have no fertility issues at all.

I voted YABU because it's not 'flexing' the truth to get yourself some magic key to the door of the fertility clinic. It's lying. You can't start fertility treatment with a lie. The open relationship you have with your consultant is so important, they literally want to know every detail.
Also did you know it takes 3 months for any changes you make to translate to your egg quality? So realistically even if you made the changes with supplements etc on day 1 (which you probably didn't because most people don't head into TTC thinking they will need x, y and z to help) then you've only had 2 months of trying with the 'extra help' from supplements. Also even in two fertile people, the chance of conception each month is something around 25%.

Honestly you come across as entitled and unwilling to give up control on something that you can't actually control. It's a little bit disturbing that you've been TTC for 5 months yet you've already had his sperm analysed and all your bloods done. You need to chill out, because I can tell you one thing from personal experience (feel free to search my username, I spent ALOT of time on the infertility boards), you think you've got no control now? Wait until you've got even less control during IVF. I really hope it works out for you, but you really need to just get over the entitled sense that you deserve to be pregnant right this second and almost sound jealous of people over 35 who may be able to "jump the qué" because of their age.

@mariannaf
I agree try to relax, from my last miscarriage to conceiving my lg it took 18 months, the month I conceived her I lost my best friend to cancer, so ttc was no where on my mind, 2 weeks after we lost her I found out I was pregnant, I have a 28 day cycle but ovulation happens cd11 so not bang on day 14 like they say, I say have sex every other day from around cd 9, I took high dose vitamin d changed folic acid to folate, there's conceive plus for him and her you can buy on amazon its meant to improve the man's sperm to.