IVF Content

Was swithering about posting this, but this seems like a really supportive community from my short time on here and I don’t know many people in my real life who have done this. Half venting, half asking for advice:

After a couple years of trying unsuccessfully, the OH and I have begun IVF (ICSI) treatment. We were put on the waiting list about 8 months ago, which is supposed to be around a year, but received the news that we were at the top of the waiting list after about 5 months.

Obviously this is excellent news – but I don’t think either of us were ready for how difficult it would be. I have it a lot easier than her, in that all I need to do is stay off the bike (which is actually a bit of a mental health lifeline for me but I can sort of run ish), be supportive as possible, and help with injections.

She needs to keep within several physiological parameters, get scans constantly, go to endless appointments and deal with the hormonal effects of the medication. All of this on top of the massive emotional effects for both of us, it’s a proper rollercoaster and dealing with that and work and everything is very difficult, we have had a few days off between us just because we are so knackered. It’s really difficult for us to know how open we want to be about it beyond immediate family & close friends.

Luckily we get 3 x cycles for free on the NHS up here, but it is still absolutely nerve-wracking even starting the first one. I’m just wondering if anyone here has gone through the process, and what kind of coping mechanisms you might use to stop feeling like your life is fully on hold? We know this is a huge step and a positive thing to do, but sometimes it really feels very hard.

Thank you

Been there. Yes it’s a rollercoaster. I’m afraid for us it was be supportive and understanding. Yes your life is on hold. I’m sorry to say the actual process is pretty tough for both.

Good luck, I hope you are successful.

@onehundredthidiot – Absolutely, I don’t want to come across as if this isn’t something we will be putting all of our energy into. Many thanks.

It is absolutely exhausting mentally and physically for you both – takes a large toll. Only you can decide how open you want to be – I was more than my wife and had some awesome support from friends and work colleagues.

Why stay off the bike? if it is a significant stress relief then it has a place in the process too – allowing you to feel the relief and having the bandwidth to support your partner. Even starting talking here should help, as it is treated so secretly sometimes that is a massive stressor. Ultimately nobody else’s opinion/ choices except you two is the right one for you, it’s easy look at others decisions and outcomes and question your path – try not do that as can lead down negative path.

I am more than happy to have a chat – here, phone, message if you ever want/ need it. If anywhere near North East happy to meet up to chat/ for venting. We had to go private and had multiple cycles so feel free to ask any questions.

And yes, here is amazing for support.

Just want to say that it you sound like a great guy wanting to do the best for your other half, and I wish you all the best with it.

Remember that you can’t help others if you haven’t helped yourself. A half hour on the bike may not seem “worth it” but don’t dismiss it if bikes are your therapy.

Nothing useful to add from a personal perspective but have had a lot of friends go through this. Even if you were to be unsuccessful, it is not the end of your “journey” as a couple, or to becoming a family.

@northshoreniall – Thank you very much for that – I may take you up on your offer of a chat at some point or at least just vent a bit more, nice to be in touch.

It is a funny thing to keep secret, I think for my wife especially it feels like there is a bit of a stigma attached when all of her friends with kids have conceived naturally. But on the other hand, it is private and invasive and perhaps we want to just put a brave face on. My work is good about it, but I think it’s quite hard to get it across to them that as well as being great news and a quick op with a turkey baster, it’s many weeks of very hard going.

Re: the bike – doctors orders really. As I understand it, it is a very tenuous link between sitting on a saddle for ages and sperm quality. However my counts have been up and down in my samples, and the doctor framed it as “This is one of the biggest things you’ll ever do, and hopefully it won’t be for long” – so I just want to maximise chances. It sucks, but I am convincing myself that running is fun, ever so slowly! Tell you what, walking up mountains without a bike on your bike is an amazing feeling…just coming down isn’t as good.

Yes been there.

I was in a pretty stressful role at the time restructuring a dept and all the fun that comes with that, whilst also trying to keep my fitness at a high level and racing various events.  Oh and we got burgled and cleaned out.  Oh and we moved house to an old build and found loads of horrors…..

I know it is bad for the woman, but don’t underestimate the impact on yourself.  I bascially ended up burnt out and messed up….seem to have permanently given myself IBS / problems sleeping etc… .so don’t just try and crack on with stuff and ignore any warning signs

On the plus side, IVF boy#1 has just turned 9, and boy#2 was natural, literally first go….. they are mostly brilliant.  I really wanted a third but wife was 100% no chance!

Wife seemed to really rate pregnacy accupunture

Good luck, focus on the outcome you want

Almost 16 years ago since we went through it (same as you, IVF with ICSI) and yes it can be stressful, but try to focus on the end goal and not the process. You are very fortunate to be getting the full three cycles on the NHS (we lost out due to ‘postcode lottery’ as our Trust provided no support at all so we had to go private).

But, as has been said – why stay off the bike? As long as you can provide a few viable sperm per cycle (pardon the pun), I can’t see how staying off the bike will really help. It certainly wasn’t advice I was given, although I do recall driving (I had a long commute at the time) with air vents blowing cold air on my nuts and other such things to improve sperm quality.

Another thing – do whatever you both believe may work – we did acupuncture as my wife believed it would work. I thought it was a load of bollocks, but I kept my mouth shut and went through with it so my wife saw that I was as equally invested as she was in making it work.

And neither of you should feel that it’s embarrassing and something you can’t talk about – infertility is a thing that affects something like 20% of couples (IIRC, I haven’t checked those figures) and much of it is down to environmental issues (especially effecting sperm quality). If it helps, I shouldered all the ‘blame’ (ie, it was my sperm low mobility that caused the issue) and everyone knew that so my wife didn’t have to shoulder any additional feelings of not being as good at making babies as her friends.

Finally (I think, I am going on a bit), even if either or both of you have fertility issues, it isn’t always definitive that you won’t conceive naturally – I know of three close friends that went through IVF with and without success who then went on to conceive naturally.

Good luck and fingers crossed for you that it all works out. As others, I would be happy to share more if you want.

We went through four years of IVF and it never bastard worked.

She is now hell bent on adoption and I am, it’s fair to say, not – so it’s probably the end of our relationship.

It was really intense, the first treatment where they harvest the eggs, they over stimulated my OH and she spent 3 weeks in ICU where they didn’t know how to get the hormones back to acceptable levels.

We weren’t successful will all 26 eggs they harvested, we never tried again

I think your doc is winging it re: biking – unfortunately a lot of fertility medicine is of the trial and error and heavily has anecdotal advice on exercise, meds, coffee, anything. Edit – we did really work on eating well, increased protein, prioritise sleep and general exercise to try optimise. The impact could be seen on swimmers, even 1 time I needed antibiotics for dental abscess knocked them off temporarily.

It’s really frustrating, we both work in healthcare and found it so frustrating – especially as you are so caught up in it all that you are afraid to disagree just in case it’s that one thing that maybe makes the difference.

I went to one of the fertility shows, wife was working so couldn’t, and found some of the talks really helpful – some experts were not happy with the industry and the add-ons and random shit they recommended as added cost and strain.

Also agree with above re: don’t underestimate toll on you – which can be hard for a partner full to the gills with extra hormones/ injections/ investigations to appreciate. It’s a real rollercoaster ride.

I do kind of get the feeling that there is some winging it going on with the biking advice. However, it is not for too long (been two weeks, just another two weeks until it works or it doesn’t). So in this instance I am keen to follow it just in case it is the last 0.5%…but as you say it is probably very extra-cautionary. I am still bike commuting, and to be quite honest would be happy to do some “push up, ride down” MTB rides.

Luckily my wife is very on it with noticing my mood changes etc, and is in a very “We are in it together” mindset whatever happens. So I have that on my side.

It is quite good to hear some more “real life” stuff from you all. A lot of what we get on various social media algorithms is all very idealised and curated about the whole topic. A slightly different experience when you are holding a bag of frozen peas against your partners stomach at 7am to numb it before shakily jagging a needle in there!

Yes, I went through this four times with my ex-wife. It was a very, very difficult time for us both with both the hormones and the pregnancies that followed and, ultimately, we were not able to overcome things and divorced.

How did we cope at the time? I don’t know. I tried to be as supportive as I could be (small things like washing up helped), but the hormones that were raging through her system often meant arguments with tiny triggers and a lot of the time that meant me accepting the grief. I had work to help me with some space (but that is _not_ a solution) and I had the TA as another breather (but that is _not_ a solution).

Honestly, I recommend finding a good counsellor, potentially one for both of you together, potentially one for each separately. Talking to someone that is objective can help; IVF is terribly, terribly hard on both a body and a mind.

I really, really hope that you have success!

But, as has been said – why stay off the bike? As long as you can provide a few viable sperm per cycle (pardon the pun), I can’t see how staying off the bike will really help. It certainly wasn’t advice I was given,

I think you’ve answered your own question:

Another thing – do whatever you both believe may work – we did acupuncture ….I thought it was a load of bollocks, but I kept my mouth shut and went through with it so my wife saw that I was as equally invested as she was in making it work.

Speed is your friend for injections, as a nurse who has done thousands,  and did most of my wife’s too. Its mildly terrifying for most, especially as you don’t really get taught/ practice as a civilian undergoing this.

Watch out for rose tinted specs on media/ forums too, as loads forget the hard bits if they have succeeded.

I don’t have experience of IVF, but my partner and I weren’t able to have kids naturally, and then had a fairly bruising couple of years jumping through hoops for adoption. We decided not to adopt in the end, after getting approved. We’re perfectly happy now without children.

So my advice to OP and partner is: don’t stake all your hopes and dreams on IVF working. Children aren’t everything. Very many people have a great and happy life without them. I think having children (or not) can be seen as a zero-sum game – but it’s just one of those twists and turns that make all our lives different.

I understand how important this will feel to the OP now, but it might be worth both of you trying to picture a future without children (including all the positives – like having much more money and time to do what you want with your spare time, career) so that if the IVF doesn’t work it doesn’t feel like falling off a cliff, but more like taking a different fork in the road (sorry for the mixed metaphor).

Good luck, SIL and her partner have been on a rollercoaster with this over the last year or so, ended up recently going to a Czech republic clinic for effectively last chance and is now ~6 weeks pregnant.

@snowy1 – Absolutely. We have discussed and are aware that the chances of IVF are usually less than 50%. Having kids is something OH has always wanted, I was a little slower to get off the fence, just in the past 5 years or so, but after some family stuff happened a while back it is now something I am just as enthusiastic for.

However, we both think that if it doesn’t work then we will be able to come out the other side. We are attending counselling as a couple and on our first one the woman started crying because she said she doesn’t see many couples as strong as us haha. I thought that was a bit hammy myself (internally) but there you go…

It’s not something we are focusing on at the moment, but we both know we will have to add that extra meaning somehow if kids don’t come along. We’ve all but ruled out adoption, and paying privately as well if our 3 goes don’t work. But – you never know what will happen and how we will feel at that stage!

If anything, there might be regrets that we started quite late (relatively in NHS terms, we are both mid-30s). But that was a mutual decision and we don’t blame each other…and have had the opportunity to do some cool things we may not have been able to do otherwise.

It is a funny thing to keep secret, I think for my wife especially it feels like there is a bit of a stigma attached when all of her friends with kids have conceived naturally. But on the other hand, it is private and invasive and perhaps we want to just put a brave face on.

This is a bit of a self-fulfilling prophesy – if everyone assumes it’s private and puts a brave face on, no one talks, you feel like you’re the only ones who have an issue, you feel stigma as the odd ones out. If you do share, you might find a few of those friends who you thought had no problems didn’t find it as easy as you thought. You might find that you being open helps you and your wife process things, helps others share and and is a little step to reducing the stigma overall.

But some people prefer not to share, and that’s fine too.

Luckily my wife is very on it with noticing my mood changes etc, and is in a very “We are in it together” mindset whatever happens. So I have that on my side.

That sounds like a bloody brilliant, bloody important thing to have on your side! As well as the NHS support. Didn’t find out until after we moved that if we’d bought the other house we looked at on the other side of the stream, we’d be in a different care trust with no support at all. Don’t see that mentioned on Rightmove info!

MrsRNP and I are perhaps the other side of the coin. MrsRNP was absolutely 100% put on this planet to be a mother but was devastated when early onset menopause meant that was not going to easily if at all happen.

IVF was an option but we decided not to because of mainly her mental state at the time. Counseling helped what was in effect grieving and now in the distance from that period of our lives things are great. No children and we didn’t adopt but the lack of financial burden has allowed MrsRNP to persue philanthropy avenues which she loves doing.

And I got a dog instead!

Good luck, if you decide to stop IVF or it doesn’t work – life is still good afterwards it’s just that you’ll go a different route.

I think you’ve answered your own question:

Yeah probably – I am by no means perfect (in many ways).

Another note – when we went through it all, and on finding our particular Trust had no provision for IVF, we decided to go public with it and ended up doing a few newspaper and radio interviews on the subject of the availability (or not) depending on where you live. I think that distracted us a bit from what we were actually going through ourselves.

It was particularly frustrating as we opted to have our private treatment done at Leeds General Infirmary as they had the highest success rate locally at the time – we queued up with a load of people getting their meds and paying just the standard prescription fee but when it came to us (because we live in North Yorkshire, not West), we had to write out a cheque for almost £1,000 (that was just for the meds).

Its tough, and hard work for your partner / wife, and at times you will feel like throwing it all in and quitting, but keep perservering. We nearly quite and glad we didn’t as it worked out for us.

Sadly though it doesn’t always work out, despite all your best intentions.

Thanks for all the replies everyone – it is helpful to read about both good and bad outcomes to be quite honest. It is very much appreciated.

I also had no idea that the support offered varied so much between trusts. Someone having to pay from being the other side of a dual carriageway is pretty nuts to think about. Feel very lucky to have the support of the NHS in our case. If something goes wrong and a cycle has to be cancelled before implantation that doesn’t even count towards our 3 x funded cycles.

I also had no idea that the support offered varied so much between trusts. Someone having to pay from being the other side of a dual carriageway is pretty nuts to think about. Feel very lucky to have the support of the NHS in our case. If something goes wrong and a cycle has to be cancelled before implantation that doesn’t even count towards our 3 x funded cycles.

Yeah, it’s something that has been brushed under the collective NHS carpet for some time. NICE recommends that every Trust should provide three cycles to any eligible party but unfortunately they cannot enforce it and some Trusts choose to offer fewer than three or, in some cases, none at all. In our local Trust the eligibility criteria is (IIRC) that both parties must have no children (either from their or any other previous relationships) and the female party has to be between 39.5 and 40 years old (a six month window) – which is particularly silly as, at that age, her fertility will be lower anyway and the chance of success will be reduced. 16 years later, I still feel very mad about it all.

So my advice to OP and partner is: don’t stake all your hopes and dreams on IVF working. Children aren’t everything. Very many people have a great and happy life without them. I think having children (or not) can be seen as a zero-sum game – but it’s just one of those twists and turns that make all our lives different.

Lots of this, too. IVF is bloody hard, but every “success”, every milestone is another door to more stuff that’s bloody hard – my wife miscarried our 1st “successful” IVF round (there’s another load of felt stigma/ sharing/not sharing on that topic), stress of scans, is the baby healthy “normal”, what do you do if it’s not, is it developing well, is your wife healthy though pregnancy – childbirth (more stigma of doing it “well” sharing /not sharing of difficulties) early months/years of sleepless nights, health/development concerns, mental health/development concerns. And cost. Private IVF is costly, but it’s a 6 month’s of nursery fees for our two round here.

The thing that’s especially difficult about IVF, though, is the existential angst about whether you’re going to be a parent to kids for the rest of your life, or you’re not. Which comes back to snowy’s point above- there’s a lot of great ways to live a life, and being a parent isn’t the be-all and end-all.

Funding is a massive issue – Prof Winston has commented many times on how it is artificially high and doesn’t need to be, meaning more people could have access.

We went to both Spain and Greece for cycles. Medications were mad expensive here, luckily ended up using an Outpatients pharmacy in local hospital who kindly didn’t take the piss with costs.

We had our first child through IVF (ICSI) and totally agree with the others in that it was a total emotional rollercoaster. For us the disappointment every month from trying had kind of pushed us to almost giving up entirely – we went into IVF with little to no expectations but amazingly were successful on our first go. I was obviously over the moon but going from basically accepting it wasn’t going to happen to ‘holy sh*t I’m going to be a dad’ was hard going emotionally. Being there for each other is the best thing you can do and its clear you’re both really supportive of one another. If it doesn’t work then your life will go down another path and will likely be a positive one given the support you both have for each other.

Best of luck!

Being through this one, it’s tough but if it works it’s a superb thing. Daughter now coming to 5yrs. Luckily you have 3 goes via NHS ours was only 1 so added some pressure. We had some counselling which helped us both through the mental challenge. I personally gave up coffee, reduced MTB, showers only no hot baths and tried all sorts of things to help my count. I had acupuncture which may have helped me, who knows if it actually helped but it definitely helped with the mental side, gave me the reassurance i was trying. We never got an answer on what may have prevented us naturally and we found the process pre IVF quite stressful.

Lots of talking with each other helped us through it plus a few close friends to just talk, not really details just basics which helped with the mental load as well.

Good luck

Add me to the ‘been there done that’ list. We had two goes available on the NHS, and were fortunate enough that the first was enough for our first daughter (now 5). We then used one of the frozen embryos privately for our second daughter (coming up to 2), and put a pin in it there.

I’m sure my memory has faded for a lot of the challenges now, but one of the comments above about the mental approach resonated with me. This is something which is both highly stressful and not 100% certain to succeed, so I think it’s really important to ensure that if all doesn’t go as you hoped then you have no regrets or anything you can’t beat yourself up about after the fact. If that means staying off the bike and the coffee so that you don’t regret things maybe being different if you hadn’t gone on that one bike ride, then such is life. It also shows solidarity with your partner.

For us, I also think it’s really important to set boundaries or limits. You can obviously spend a lot of time, money, and emotional capital here if this doesn’t come to pass as you hope it will. With our second, we had two embryos left and said that we would pay privately to try them both and if that didn’t work, we would leave it there. Again as has been noted above, people live highly fulfilling childfree lives even if that wasn’t the original plan.

I guess in short, while I’m hoping for the best for you and yours, do everything you can to set yourself up emotionally for what might come afterwards.

We then used one of the frozen embryos privately for our second daughter

We didn’t even have the opportunity to freeze any embryos – we had two fertilised eggs and they said that one of them was quite weak and not worth trying to freeze (which was going to be our preferred option) so we may as well pop it in and my wife got pregnant. We were then told at our 12 week scan that one of the fetuses was quite week and to be prepared that it probably wouldn’t go full term (obviously we have no idea if it was the same egg). Fortunately they both went full term and we now have two beautiful 15 year old girls.

Edit – just looking at current stats – when we went through it, success rates were circa. 25% for a woman of my wife’s age. They have increased to over 40% now. Wow – that is some increase over 15 years.

We didn’t even have the opportunity to freeze any embryos

It wasn’t our plan, but we had to delay implantation by a month or so for reasons I forget but I think related to a vaccination my other half didn’t apparently have. Or something.

We had 1 x level 5 and 2 x level 3s as I recall. Not that you can tell a difference between the level 5 and the level 3 now that they’re running around and causing trouble!

Our ICSI twins are also running around and causing trouble (they’re 21 now).

We were fortunate in a lot of ways, both in the sense that we hadn’t had years of failing to conceive in the run-up to it, as we knew IVF would be required for a family. And also that we got lucky first cycle.

I think our mindset was that we were equally prepared for failure as for success, and we made parallel plans so we had stuff to look forward to if the treatments hadn’t been successful, rather than put all our emotional eggs in one basket, as it were.

Good luck – and don’t fall into the trap of thinking that if it doesn’t work, it was something you did or didn’t do. It’s as random as the real thing in the end.

She is now hell bent on adoption and I am, it’s fair to say, not –

Really personal question, but why?

Massive respect for those that do adopt given there are lots of kids out there in need of a home.

Massive respect for those that do adopt given there are lots of kids out there in need of a home.

Adoption is one pathway, another is fostering – and there are way, way more kids in need of foster homes than adoption.

Massive respect for those that do foster

Really personal question, but why?

Not at all, thanks for asking. I too have big respect for those that adopt and foster. There’s a lot of factors that make it different to, and potentially harder than, parenting your own child.

In the UK, it’s not like the 70s and before when children were regularly taken from birth mothers for no other reason than they weren’t married.

Nowadays, the courts view removing someones’ parental rights as up there with the most serious impingements of human rights that exist – akin to life sentence without parole. We also have free and comparatively easy access to abortions in the UK.

In practice, this means the vast majority of children in need of adoption will have been either removed from their parents under duress, because social workers have deemed the child to be in material danger (e.g. due to domestic abuse, sexual abuse or neglect), and/or because the mother is too affected by substance abuse and/or mental illness to care for her child. That brings with it not only the massive trauma of being removed from your birth mother, but also often foetal alcohol development syndrome, neonatal abstinence syndrome (=opiate withdrawal in newborns), impacts of malnutrition and elevated cortisol during pregnancy, etc etc.

It’s a lottery whether any of these issues affect the child, but statistics indicate they often do. I have recently undertaken the pre-adoption training offered by my local authority, which had a variety of opportunities to speak to adoptive parents. Two had good experiences, one said it had “in a way, ruined her life”, another told stories about locking herself in the bathroom to hide from her five-year old son because she was tired of him hitting her, one talked frankly about how they weren’t sure if they actually loved their adopted child.

You’re also signing up for ongoing engagement with the birth family, often mandated by court order (usually via letters , but could be meeting grandparents or parents themselves), with social workers, and maybe difficult conversations with schools on topics like “why did your child have a meltdown in today’s exercise about family trees/making mother’s day cards?“.

So yeah – huge respect for people that do it, but it’s not for everyone.

IVF failure here. I will spare you the (many) details but we gave up because of the hormonal impact, not the financial – the %ages were always against us.

My one bit of advice is that the clinics do free counselling – use it.

Be kind to each other & good luck.

+1 to @finbar too:

So yeah – huge respect for people that do it, but it’s not for everyone.

@finbar – many are relinquished also for reasons as basic as they aren’t ready to be able to support a child. So with less risk of some things you describe,  but still have trauma of being given up to process as they age.

Having done IVF and being mid adoption currently,  I would say the latter is multitudes harder and taken a massive toll edit – removed bit of information as probably overshare.

Ours has been so stressful, intrusive, promised support being non-existent and concerns been repeatedly minimise/ dismissed by the self-titled ‘professionals’ – bitter much? Hell yes, not to derail thread but ours should have been straightforward process as he’s a family member and it’s been anything but – I could go on but won’t. But I know we are not unique here. So I would actively advise it needs massive and realistic research before commitment.

I wish you all the luck in the world @northshoreniall. I can empathise with the stressful and intrusive nature of the process, and I’ve only got as far as pre-approval training.

My local authority – which is a metropolitan area of almost a million people – only did 17 adoptions in 2018, and 16 the year before. They wouldn’t share a more recent figure, but said it had gone even lower during covid.

I was blown away by that; I suspect the number is so low, in part, because the process is so hard and takes so long that a lot of children get older than most adoptive parents are looking for, so wind up in care instead.