IVF / ICSI AUGUST 2025

[VioIetMoon]

I thought I would create an August support thread for anyone that may need it ❤

@Bees28 yes my first cycle! What about you? How many eggs did they manage to collect?

@Peonies94This is my first as well. They retrieved 16 and then 15 were mature and only 11 fertilized successfully. I’m 33 with unexplained “secondary infertility (3 miscarriages) . You?

@VioIetMoon so sorry to hear your update, your clinic sounds really frustrating!
I just double checked my follicle size from my January cycle as I remember they were huge. On the day of trigger I had one of 27mm, 2 of 23mm, and 2 of 14mm. My clinic at the time told me they were all mature and that non of them were overmature (which I don’t really believe). In the end I managed to have 2 blasts even with these huge follicles (one ended in a MMC and the other was bad quality), but hopefully this gives you a bit of hope regarding the size!

I fully understand about not wanting to put yourself through egg retrieval if you already feel like it’s not going to work, but would you get some money back from your clinic at all?

@Waitingforday6 I'm not convinced my smaller follicles will grow ahead of retrieval. Their growth seems to have halted. I'm really not sure why.
All the increased dose seems to be doing is excelerating the 4 dominant follicles and the nurse said at my scan on Monday the larger follicles would probably push the smaller ones out. I definitely think the higher dose was needed at the start to give them a kick up the bum rather than upping it so significantly when I was getting close to trigger.
I just hate the thought of having to subject myself to this a third time.
We have our appointment with another clinic next month just for a chat anyway. I think it'll be interesting to hear if they will do anything different. I think thats the only thing that would encourage us to go for one more round. I don't want to proceed with another clinic that I don't have confidence in. I should have trusted my gut from the start but live and learn. With our current clinic we didn't know any information about our treatment plan , stim days, doses ect until baseline scan 2 days before we started. Is this normal? On my last cycle we had all that information in advance, before I even started my bleed.
I think we unfortunately would have to finance another round. This clinic doesn't even offer finance. We had to pay everything upfront before we could start so we had no idea we wouldn't be happy with the outlined plan

@YellowTack ah thats nice to hear and im sorry you endured a mmc.
How many of the 4 collected fertilised? If you don't mind me asking . What from I'm reading it says they are unlikely to fertilised when beyond optional range

@Georgiaivf next scan is tomorrow - day 9 of cycle. Jesus i am so bloated already and even feel pain bending over. Great news on the scan and potential egg collection Monday and also your experience with the scan. I feel like my app was good but a bit rushed yesterday and need to take a picture of the graph of how well they are growing as its a lot to take in.

@YellowTack thats really interesting about prague and sounds like it has been a good experience for you from the clinics side. I am so sorry that this is your 5th round, it is exhausting after my first one. Its just so unfair that you have to go through this back to back to get embryos.

@VioIetMoon oh my love, how frustrating and upsetting, i don't blame you for feeling totally emotionally and teary. I really hope you manage to get something from EC - keeping everything crossed for you.

@Chlo1995 thank you for your kind words and yes numbing the area has really worked better. Glad you got 19 and fingers crossed for your blasts.

@Peonies94 good luck for the next 5 days.

@Bees28 - i am also doing PGTA - first round - EC early next week. fingers crossed for you for the next 5 days.

I am actually dreading that 5 days. :(

@VioIetMoon from my January cycle 2 out of the 6 eggs collected fertilised and these 2 became blasts!

I had my last scan this morning, unfortunalely the smaller follicule didn’t catch up, so I will be triggering tonight for egg collection on Saturday, for only one follicle.

I am of course dissapointed, I can’t believe I went through all of this for one follicle. I can only hope that this follicle will make it but I also have to guard my heart as I know statistics are not in my favoir.

As it’s only one follicle, I won’t be having sedation bit at this stage I am not really worried about the pain.

@YellowTack ah I'm sorry to hear that lovely. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for this follicle. You are so incredibly strong to keep going
As for me, EC is in the morning.
The dr told me to take another dose last night. I stupidly did which I now regret taking such a large amount when my only follicles were already beyond optimal range

Fingers crossed for everyone approaching egg collection and sorry to hear about any disappointing updates. I really hope we all get our perfect future baby. The 5 day wait really is hard, I didn't think day 6 (when we got our update) would ever come. @VioIetMoon good luck! I completely understand the regret but when we had some confusion around trigger shots (a bit of a nightmare, the syringe was wrong and didn't match the dose, the nurse told us where she thought we should draw the injection which was different from what we thought was right, the clinic was already closed, the pharmacist gave us a different syringe with the right dose but wrong needle type) and in the end we told ourselves that if it goes wrong what will we regret more, it going wrong because we did what we thought was right and made the wrong decision or if it went wrong because (or despite) we listened to a medical professional and we decided to just go with what they suggested. So if you hadn't taken the dose as recommended and had a negative result you might regret not listening to a professional but you shouldn't really feel guilty for following their instructions because you did what you could. If that makes any sense. Hang in there!!!

Fingers crossed for your ECs @VioIetMoon& @YellowTack. The nurses told me the scans are only indicative of number of follicles and sometimes there’s follicles they can’t see and in the procedure they try to drain each one, so fingers crossed for you both from this point forwards 🤞🏼 be kind to yourselves in recovery!

Just wanted to respond to this one re getting info from your clinic in advance… whilst my clinic have had a few ahem mishaps, we knew protocol and medications after our first consultation with the doctor (so back in April), and then I knew the provisional stims start date and EC date when I had my bleed at the end of June (this was when I could proceed to take the oral medication in my schedule). My clinic also prepared a calendar for me with my schedule on breaking it down day by day which was also provided to me at the end of June (with the caveat of knowing this is changeable dependent on my bleed timing after norethisterone and if I needed to stim for longer). It’s been very useful in preparing mentally in advance- I’m sorry your clinic provided this information to you so close to starting! It always helps to know in advance so you can ask questions as I’m sure you know from your first round, but all clinics are different!

@Georgiaivf ah yes there's such a vast difference between clinics it seems.
Our clinic boast about having the most modern lab technology but their organization is dreadful and communication is in the dark ages 😆
Last round , we had a patient portal and could see our calender with all the dates, scans , collection, message system between myself and nurses ect, what time and what medication I should be taking each day. Everything was planned so well and we never questioned what we were doing on a daily basis.
With this clinic we never know. We go there every other day for a scan and then they email us a spreadsheet , which I can't even open on my phone. I have to screenshot and try and zoom in. it's contained several spelling mistakes and they had me down on it for a different trigger. On occasion it will open, but i find it difficult to navigate and understand it as it doesnt fit on the phone screen properly so i get confused what information is correlating to what drug. I just found it extremely hard to follow and the other day I didn't even get their email so I turned up for my scan at the completely wrong time. I was 2 hours early. I don't think emails are that reliable with passing on patient info. I've no idea why they operate like this.
How is everyone else viewing their treatment plan?

@Georgiaivf your first clinic sounds exactly like ours with the portal and everything uploaded onto it for reference.

That sounds incredibly frustrating with main method of communication being emails annd spreadsheets.

I think in IVF your perception of how good a clinic is is mainly in their communication and openness with you. How frustrating about your appt time the other day! You’d think they would’ve confirmed with you in person at your previous appt what time they were booking you in for.

Apologies if I missed this but which trigger did you take yesterday ahead of EC?

It does sound really frustrating @VioIetMoon. Our clinic also uses a portal with a calendar for appointments and the different drugs to be taken each day with instructions and you can log them as taken, you also get daily reminders for drugs and appointments and use it to message the various teams. We were given the drugs schedule step by step but with notice, so I was given the progynova info in good time, then once I confirmed my period had started I got the gonal f info with multiple days notice, not sending it all at the same time was probably to avoid starting the stims too early accidentally. There were also videos on how to take each medication. Sorry if you mentioned this before but was there a reason you changed clinics? Was one of them the NHS round?

Just a little update from me, spent the day recovering from my collection yesterday, plenty of cuddles with the dog today!

Had a phone call with my clinic today who informed me 15 of my eggs were mature and 7 have fertilised.

We are now due for transfer on 18/08 as long as everything is looking good on that morning.

Hope everyone is doing okay and things are progressing for you all x

Well done @Chlo1995 fingers crossed for a fresh transfer and a quick recovery! We are a freeze all so a bit of a wait still (probably October/November time due to other stuff going on that was already booked in).

@Waitingforday6 well we have a bit of an issue with my fertility clinic saying that I was overstimulating, the clinic where I went for egg collection didn’t actually know this and they wouldn’t have classed me at overstimulating, more just on the border of it.

I have a review appointment with the fertility clinic tomorrow for them to check symptoms over and if all is good we can avoid freezing.

Oh wow, I didn’t realise that there was that much of a wait for a frozen transfer, hope all goes well for you when the time comes!x

Ah gotcha @Chlo1995 fingers crossed! And don't worry if it's a freeze all most clinics are happy to do a transfer the next cycle (a few weeks later potentially) or the month after that it's just that the dates clash with some other commitments based on when I am expecting my period each month otherwise I'd be prepping now as I already had my post-EC bleed.

How did it go @VioIetMoon?

I hope those that are in for egg collection rest up this afternoon/evening and that it went ok for you.

Had my final tracking scan today and I have about 24 follicles total, of which about 11 look to be within the correct size range.

Confirmed my EC is Monday, but we are doing a freeze all cycle because they saw some fluid near my ovaries and some near my lining so my risk of OHSS is higher than they’d like for a fresh (totally fine with me, consultant set our expectations on this way back in April that we’d likely be a freeze all). I’d also imagine this has something to do with stimming for a total of 13 days lol but I’d rather have more follicles than trigger prematurely.

@Waitingforday6 so I’ll be joining your waiting for transfer club soon! My clinic said realistically with bleed timings my transfer is likely to be Oct/Nov. I’m triggering with Buserelin also- quick question, do you have to store this in the fridge? They didn’t mention it- it just says store below 25 degrees 🤷🏼‍♀️

Welcome to the club @Georgiaivf! We can keep each other company! 😀 I didn't keep my Buserelin in the fridge, it arrived in the non-fridge box and I kept it there. 😊 Fingers crossed for Monday that's a great number! I felt a bit off tummy wise the day after trigger but hopefully that was just random (and my ovaries were so swollen I think it was squeezing everything else).

@Waitingforday6 Ah lovely thank you! I think I was overthinking it because it’s so warm today haha - my clinic have just got back to me to confirm the same!

Thank you, I shall let you know how it goes. Good to have the stomach thing in mind! Luckily I’m not doing anything Sunday haha, I know what you mean, mine are pressing on my bladder now so I constantly need a wee 🤣

My EC didn't really go as I hoped.
We got 8 follicles but only 3 eggs compared to 7 eggs last cycle.
I feel so disheartened this time. I had over 30 follicles but just just a handful grew. I'm questioning is it me or would changing the protocol help?
I'm just not sure where we go from here or how we can improve things. I think our clinic are a bollox. When we arrived they asked us did we take our trigger at 9.20pm as written on their notes, when the email clearly instructed us and we were told at clinic in person to take it at 10pm. As per usual, another clerical error.
I'm relieved to have finished up treatment with them to be honest.
As for EC, The pain was alot more than I remembered the first time. I'm assuming the first time I must have had sedation. This time I opted for local as they told me most women find it manageable. I only had 1 follicle on my right ovary and they couldn't access the follicle at first as he said it was very deep in the ovary so he then had to go back through my left ovary to access the right. My cervix was also really high so he had pierced through my cervix with the needle aswell . Let's just say next time I'll be opting for sedation.
I'm feeling OK, just really crampy and sore to move. One part I really didn't enjoy was the paracetamol pessary up the arsehole! Who knew this was even a thing?
We won't know until tomorrow how many are mature and will fertilise.
I just feel hopeless. We've also been told that even if we manage to get something to transfer we are advised against a fresh as they discovered my progesterone is really high and the dr said he can't understand the explanation for this at all.
The bloods were fine on Monday when I should have initially triggered but they held me off til Wednesday and on Wednesday it was up, beyond normal range .the dr said this really reduces the likelihood than an embryo will implant if progesterone is high on the date of trigger. I think it causes a mix up in signals and leaves the womb less receptive for an embryo as its not ready. My partner had a look online what could cause this , and it seemed to suggest it can happen when the eggs are ready to go but they don't get releasing or something like this. Its further added to my questioning if they triggered me too late as nobody seems to giving me any explanation as to why they delayed me if my main follicles were within optimal range. Instead they just waited until they surpassed the ideal range.
We spent 10k on this cycle and they had the nerve to tell us to bring our own snacks if we wanted something to eat after it 😆 Even the nhs gave us tea and toast.
Anyway, I've had a cry about it and i wish we could go back in time but I've come to the realisation there's nothing I can do at this point that's going to change the outcome so I just have to move on.
We're going to work out things out and see if we can afford one more attempt in a few months time

@Waitingforday6 yes our first round was nhs funded. I couldnt fault our nhs clinic at all . They definitely do the best with what they have