Experience with Lister

[MulletMilltet]

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to get a really practical understanding of what treatment at the Lister is like beyond what’s on the website.

Im trying to get into the weeds and I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who’s been through treatment there.

I’d love to know:

1. Roughly how much did you spend from starting treatment through to pregnancy?
2. How many monitoring visits did you have during stimulation?
3. After embryo transfer, what follow-up did you have? Were you asked to come back for blood tests or scans before your pregnancy scan?
4. Did you usually see the same consultant throughout treatment—for scans, egg collection and embryo transfer?
5. Is the clinic open seven days a week for monitoring and procedures?
6. Do they generally favour fresh or frozen embryo transfers, or does it depend on the individual patient?
7. For progesterone support after transfer:
8. Were you prescribed vaginal pessaries or those bum shots)?
9. Did they check your progesterone levels after transfer and adjust the dose if needed?
10. Once you had a positive pregnancy test did Lister perform serial hCG blood tests?and how long did they continue to monitor you before discharging you to NHS

is there anything else that stood out?

if you can answer only a few of these, even thay would be super helpful.

thanks so much

Hi there,

This is obviously a lot of questions but all really valid and it’s clear you know your stuff which leads me to think that you have had treatment somewhere else and maybe been recommended to try The Lister? If that’s the case, we were in the same boat. Had a really horrible experience with a clinic in Scotland where we managed to get 0 blasts. They wanted to repeat the exact same protocol again and hope for a better result and if that didn’t work, they recommended donor sperm.

We wanted a second opinion and went to Ben Jones at The Lister as he was recommended to us and we ended up with 20 high grade embryos in the freezer. Currently 17 weeks pregnant with one of those! So I cannot recommend them enough. As for the specifics, our experience may be slightly different as we live in Glasgow so we did try to do a lot remotely but I will answer as best I can:

1. Im honestly not sure, I’d need to double check and there are so many variables. For example, we already had lots of the test results etc then we PGT-A tested 10 embryos which was a lot. I can get back to you on that though!
2. I THINK we had 4 visits before collection but I think I’m quite a slow responder. What I would say though is that they also do same day blood tests with every scan to check your response and then Ben reviews these personally every day to decide if you need a dose adjustment or not so it’s very individualised and tailored to your response.
3. we didn’t have anything after transfer as we didn’t really need anything until we knew If it had been successful or not so I’m not really sure what they would have/could have done inbetween?
4. yes we had same consultant from the POV he was always overseeing our care although didn’t see him at every appointment and I think across the board it is your luck who you get for egg collection/transfer etc but they are all highly skilled so it wasn’t too much of a concern for us. Ben gave me his personal mobile number so any questions I had, I what’s apped him and he responded straight away! Another consultant did our transfer both times and both were great.
5. YES! And for transfers and collections. I didn’t realise how rare this was until I joined some of the fb groups! They very much work the clinic around your body rather than the other way around!
6. im not sure on this one as my AMH was super high so they knew I’d be a freeze all. I suspect they will favour frozen as the results seem to be better from these and they like to give your body time to get back to its natural state but I could be wrong.
7. I was on progesterone before transfer and then after until I was 12 weeks pregnant. So all the way through. It was pessaries that could be taken vaginally or rectally.
8. Yes, they took a blood test while I was in for transfer and called up later that day to advise what the levels were and if I needed a top up or not (fortunately my levels were fine).
9. No we didn’t have blood tests with them, I’m not sure that’s something they do routinely but I doubt it. Because we were based in Glasgow we weren’t going to travel down for blood tests anyway but Ben had said if I was concerned that was something I could organise in Glasgow to check the levels were increasing.

LOADS stood out compared to our last clinic, it was genuinely night and day. One thing I would say is that everyone always focuses on the clinic alone, rather than the consultant. At the end of the day, your consultant dictates your care, so it’s so so important to choose the correct one. I’m really lucky that I work with a lot of consultants up and down the UK and was able to ask for a recommendation and I’m forever grateful for this! We only booked an appointment with Ben to get a second opinion about our treatment, we had no intention of going to London for testament but he was in a different league entirely from our first consultant and clinic. He was so knowledgeable on my egg quality for my age, environmental factors such as plastic containers at home etc. he recommended supplements that were never discussed with us before. For us personally, we were using my husbands frozen sperm and they offered IMSI instead of ICSI which we’d never heard of and basically has a 6000x greater magnification than ICSI to allow them to choose the best sperm. On top of this, unlike the last place, they didn’t want to waste the sperm they didn’t use, so they managed to split the remainder into 8 separate vials and re-freeze them in case we needed in the future. They are just so so on the ball with medical advancements and really understand the importance of every element of the journey.

one other thing I found was that due to the ongoing blood reviews and dose adjustments, ben managed to get as many of our follicles into the ‘sweet spot’ to get the biggest yield he could for us. This meant he retrieved 55 eggs for us, versus the 12 we got at our first clinic.

Obviously I’m biased as we had such a good result but I genuinely felt that if we weren’t successful there and with Ben, then we genuinely felt we’d been in the best hands and had the best options for us in front of us.

Sorry this has turned into war and peace but hopefully it helps!! Xx

Bloody love a good war and peace! Delighted you had a great result. It seems mad rhat more information about clincis is not widely available. Enjoy your pregnancy and wishing you lots of sleepless nights and teenage fights.