IVF anxiety

[Anonymous2321]

After a missed miscarriage 1 year ago and constant unsuccessful TTC, we now have a baseline scan at abc fertility tomorrow and I feel sick with anxiety. Hoping for some positive experiences to ease the nerves? I don’t know if I could handle a failed IVF after the past year plus we can’t afford more than one cycle and worried that we’re throwing money away when the odds are only 30% success.

So sorry to read about your experience until now. Good luck for tomorrow! Hopefully the baseline scan goes well, usually it'll tell you your AFC and a general scan of the ovaries and uterus to check everything is okay. I was also really nervous for mine as I knew I had a fibroid and was hoping it hadn't grown but thankfully it hadn't and it was out of the way. I also had my AMH blood test at the same time and got the results during a consultation a week later.

Even if AFC and AMH are low there is a lot they can do. Mine were on the high side of normal and I still had to go through 2 egg collections to get any embryos (quite rare). I've heard of plenty of people having success from their first round though 😊

In terms of finances, a lot of clinics do offer or partner with companies such as Access which do refund options if there is no live birth success and I think they do payment plans too.

Keeping everything crossed for you. After 5 years of unsuccessful TTC (only one pregnancy in all that time which we had to terminate due to a heart defect in the baby), we had IVF. We were lucky, it worked the first round in resulted in our beautiful daughter. I have had 3 more rounds since for a sibling, 1 very early miscarriage, 1 fail and 1 currently 9 weeks pregnant and hoping it all goes well. The anxiety is always there but I actually felt less anxious doing IVF than we we were TTC and handling the constant disappointment of my period coming. Of course there is no guarantee with IVF but I felt more in control and whether the embryo sticks or not you know that at least for that day you had an embryo in you, if that makes sense. Also the odds do vary case by case. At 35 with unexplained infertility I was given an odd of 35% and it did work, so it really comes down to the egg.

hope that helps!

Your journey has been tough @Anonymous2321 , but one thing about IVF is that it feels like you're really doing something. Regarding the odds and the percentages, we had ivf be a use if my husbands severe male factor infertility. We were expecting a low fertilisation and then attrition rate, hoping for one blastocyst. Yet from 7 eggs, they all fertilised, and all made it to day 5 (one slowed down and they didn't freeze it) but we ended up with 6 good and excellent grade embryos. The fresh transfer didn't take but the first frozen one did 2 months later. He turned one at end of July, and we have 4 frozen. So the direct odds we were given didn't happen to us at all!

Like a pp said I felt so much better mentally about ivf than ttc and getting nowhere every months, second guessing everything I did. Hope all goes well for you, you're brave to take on the challenge of ivf so remember that when you wobble.