Hi ladies, I'm just catching up on the recent messages but thought I'd chip in to share a few things I've learned during my time with ABC (Harley St). Hopefully this will be helpful to someone who's still undergoing treatment with any of their clinics. For the record, I've since been discharged (having obtained that BFP and am now 10 weeks long).
When my SO and I decided to pick ABC as our IVF clinic, we'd already heard (on threads here and elsewhere) that they don't seem the most organised/can sometimes seem a bit chaotic. But their success rates were still good and since we seemed to be a straightforward case of unexplained infertility, it seemed fine to go with a "no frills" option like ABC.
Some Key Lessons:
- If you need to do an FET, know that ABC has a tendency to push you to do a medicated FET even if you prefer a natural FET. You ABSOLUTELY should do your own research and decide for yourself which you prefer, because in our case we caught a nurse outright lying to us in this process. When our fresh transfer failed, an ABC nurse followed up by phone (standard protocol) and kept pushing for us to take the medicated FET route for our next round. When I asked why they felt this was our best option, the nurse was vague and just said the doctors had reviewed the case and based on the data from the fresh transfer we were not suited for natural FET. Beyond that, she couldn't give more details.
Her response puzzled me because ABC hadn't done any tests other than that HCG blood test. What sort of data could she be talking about that gave the doctors the impression we weren't suited for natural FET?
When I spoke to another nurse, she mentioned in passing the medicated FET is just easier for them because it allows them to control more aspects of the process than natural FET. But she also admitted that whilst there's a higher % of BFP via medicated, by the time you look at % of live birth, it works out to the same result as a natural FET (ie. though more women get tested positive via medicated, the rate of miscarriages are also higher via the medicated route, leading to the same % of live births between the two FET routes).
The way I saw it, the only result I care about is live birth - and if I can opt for the route with the lower miscarriage rate then all the better. (Not to mention it's cheaper and you're interferring with the natural processes of your body less!) I also had a slight bias against medicated based on anecdotal experience - a friend who had done a medicated FET at another clinic and ended up with a tramuatising miscarriage at week 11; she later got pregnant on natural FET and is now happily in her 2nd trimester :) So based on this tiny sample size, things aligned with what the studies showed about miscarriage rates and live birth rates between medicated VS natural FET.
When I asked this second nurse about what the first nurse had said ("based on data from our fresh transfer, we were told we should do medicated FET") the nurse dismissed that quickly and clarified we could do whatever we were comfortable with. So we ended up going natural FET and that's what gave us our current BPF :)
I'm not saying every staff there will make things up just to get you on the medicated path that makes their job easier. There are some good nurses there. But do apply critical thinking and if you have any concerns, don't just take a single staff member's word for it. Sometimes, I get the impression that they are all so busy with work that they take shortcuts in answering questions just to get through more patients.
- Manage your expectations with regards to the quality of ABC's communications with their patients. Don't assume they are always right. (@Aimes2021 - so sorry you had to go through such a sudden turn of events with the doctor. Must've been really distressing to get the news when you thought everything was coming alone fine!)
There've been a lot of mix ups during our interactions with them, including medication mix ups. So please, CHECK and double check what they give you. The worst was when they called me up about my embryos but mixed me up with another patient (!!). It was the day before my FET and as usual, the clinic (in my case, ABC's sister clinic Create St Paul's) would call you to let you know what time you need to be at the clinic for the procedure. Minutes after that call, I got a call from the same person again and she said "just to be clear, we are using one of your untested embryos this time."
This REALLY confused me, because we never sent any of our embryos for PGS testing and barely had any conversation at all with ABC about any tests. So there shouldn't be a mix of tested/untested embryos in my case. When I asked the clinician if she had mixed me up with another patient since we never had any of our embryos tested, she realised her mistake and apologised. I'm still not sure how I feel about the clinic mixing up my data with another patient's but hopefully they put the correct embryos (mine) in during the FET! They do check your name/birthday several times so should be fine...
- When going for an ultrasound scan at ABC, be sure that your room is actually locked. It's the nurse's job to personally lock the door (one of the nurses there told me this once) for privacy reasons. But on my last appointment at Harley St I ended up with the rather unpleasant experience of having a doctor barge in just as I was on the examination table with my legs spread open.
That table is positioned such that it's within direct sight of the door, so when you're on the table, your legs and your vagina face the door. Although the door was closed, a doctor just barged in without warning (I guess to speak to the nurse and thinking there were no patients) and I'm still not sure if I'd exposed myself to her while I was just lying there half naked. The doctor immediately realised her mistake and backed out of the room.
If the nurse had done her job (locking the door) or the doctor had done her job (knocking before entering) this all could've been avoided. Instead, I got a fright when the door suddenly opened and left feeling like the whole place just wasn't very professionally run.
- If you get really bad morning sickness/nausea, don't bother calling ABC for advice. I was about 5 weeks along when the nausea started. It got pretty severe at one point (threw up 5 times in one morning; couldn't hold food/water/anything down). If you look online, the NHS says you should go to A&E if you vomit more than 4 times a day, but obviously in that state, you're weak and can barely sit up, never mind take yourself to the A&E. So I thought I'd check with a medical professional before doing anything.
Now, of course you can call the NHS but they don't even know at this stage that you're pregnant, never mind having any knowledge of your fertility history/data. On the other hand, your IVF clinic has been with you through two rounds of IVF (in my case) and has all your data and has been your sole point of contact for fertility. You've not yet been discharged from them yet. Who would you call? Well, I called ABC.
Wrong move. They were really busy so said they'd call back. When they did, it was the head nurse but she seemed so harried and unhelpful. I expressed my concerns but was barely ten seconds into describing my symptoms when she interrupted and said in a really dismissive tone, "If you're that worried you should just go to A&E." The rest of the call was her saying the IVF clinic doesn't advise on problems like morning sickness and the tone she took was really disappointing and unprofessional.
One minute she was insisting that "every pregnancy is different" so refused to give any indication of how bad the situation needs to be before I should go to A&E, and then the next minute she was going into great detail about her own pregnancies and how she went through a lot etc, even though she'd just said every case is different... It was just horrible. Your body is going through some things you've never been through before, and you're scared and worried. Even if they can't help, at least take a more sympathetic tone? Ugh.
So yeah, just know that if you run into any problems, save time and call the the local EPU (early pregnancy unit) of your nearest NHS hospital directly. ABC wasn't at all helpful the two times I had run into problems during those early weeks of pregnancy.
Really hope no one has to go through the encounters I had with them, but if you do, I hope this helped someone. Happy to answer questions if any xx