Many women (and men) found the emotional impact of fertility treatment the hardest thing to cope with. Women described the treatment and uncertainty of whether it would work or not as hitting them on many different levels.
The 10-14 day waiting period between transfer and receiving the pregnancy test results is often described as the most difficult part of the cycle. Having had daily contact with your medical support staff during monitoring and retrieval, you suddenly are on your own after transfer and just have to wait.
IVF can be mentally, physically and emotionally painful. In many cases, one of the biggest complaints is bloating and pain some women face during the ovarian stimulation process, where hormones are injected to produce multiple eggs for retrieval.
IVF is a complicated process with many steps. On average, you can expect the process to last four to six weeks. This includes the time before egg retrieval, when a person takes fertility medication until they're tested for pregnancy.
The most potentially painful part of undergoing IVF is the procedure to implant the fertilized eggs back into the uterus. Done a few days after egg retrieval, this feels like a smear test; not pleasant by any means, but nothing to be scared of.
Conceiving with IVF does carry an increased risk of pregnancy complications. In particular, there is an increased risk of preterm birth, low birth weight, hypertension, maternal gestational diabetes, and placental complications⁷.
Babies conceived through IVF are typically just as healthy and normal as babies conceived the natural way. There is no additional pain that you should expect in an IVF pregnancy.
Overall, first-time IVF success rates often fall between 25-30% for most intended parents. However, this probability tends to increase after multiple IVF cycles.
Studies show that women in their 20s and 30s have the most success when getting pregnant through IVF and other reproductive technologies. According to the CDC, the average percentages of assisted reproductive technology (ART) cycles that lead to a live birth are: 31% in women younger than 35 years of age.
It's actually quite common for the first IVF cycle to fail and patients often choose to continue to pay for treatment privately until they fall pregnant. Three cycles reportedly have a cumulative effect and increase the chances of pregnancy by around 45-53%.
“For most couples – and certainly those where the woman is younger than 40 and those of any age using donor eggs – two-thirds will achieve a live birth after five or six treatment cycles. This will take, on average, two years and is similar to rates that couples conceiving naturally take in one year.”
One in six Australian couples will struggle with infertility, and one in 20 Australian babies are born from IVF.
Fatigue during IVF is typically the result of increased progesterone levels in a woman's body. This hormone helps sustain a healthy uterine lining to support a fertilized embryo. The fatigue is often linked to the use of fertility drugs, especially surrounding the critical embryo transfer phase of an IVF cycle.
Some people have religious or ethical objections to fertility treatments. You may be uncomfortable with the idea of conception happening in a lab or concerned about the creation of "extra" embryos. 7 You may not want to have to make decisions about "leftover" embryos or be against freezing them.
It might be due to hormonal changes and medications given during the IVF treatment, which could increase the risk of anxiety and depression for many women. In addition, the process is time taking and there is a risk of failure, making IVF a mentally draining experience.
In general, an average of 8 to 14 eggs are typically retrieved from a woman's ovaries with IVF; however, its ultimately not the number of eggs that matter but the quality.
IVF is not a single treatment but a series of procedures. An average IVF cycle takes about 6 to 8 weeks from consultation to transfer, but depending on the specific circumstances of each the path is similar for every patient.
As a rule of thumb, however, having about ten to 12 mature eggs after egg retrieval (not all eggs retrieved will be developed or mature enough to fertilize) is a good number of eggs and will give a woman a good chance of having at least one normal embryo, which gives a woman a 65 percent chance of pregnancy.
In the majority of circumstances, IVF injections don't involve much pain. At the same time, it's important to note that pain is subjective. It can vary from individual to individual. This means that someone who is more sensitive may experience a higher level of discomfort than someone who is less sensitive.
Because of the type of anesthesia that is used, patients do not feel any pain during the egg retrieval procedure. However, patients may experience abdominal cramping for a day or two after the procedure.
It's true that there is some research showing that pregnancies conceived via in vitro fertilization (IVF) carry a slightly increased risk of miscarriage, compared with spontaneous (natural) pregnancies. 1 The exact level of the increased risk varies by study.
A lot of patients worry about how they will feel during IVF stimulation. Many women feel like the emotions they experience are more intense. A good way to describe it is to compare it to PMS, but PMS “on steroids.” Maybe you can get a laugh out of that description.