The misconception…our fertility & IVF story plus 8 lessons I learnt along the way

So you know the old expression….when two people love each other, they get married and have a baby. It’s that easy right? This really is a misconception we are fed from childhood. Infertility is without question, the hardest thing I have even been through.

Lesson 1 - Unfortunately around 20% of couples will experience infertility

My husband and I turned 30 and decided it was time to start trying to have a baby. We were so excited! We’ve always been super healthy so we thought that couple with being relatively young, it would happen fairly easily for us. We were having all the right vitamins, and even started eating certain foods that might have influenced the gender as were daydreaming about baby names. The ovulation kits were great, we knew we were timing everything well and we did all the old tricks like keeping hips elevated for 30 minutes after. The first month or two its fun, you tell yourself everything is fine and these things just take time. Then by the time you get to 6 months, you start to worry.

Lesson 2 – If you are already healthy, you can’t control or change your fertility

So from 6 months onwards, I started to google everything, join forums, and go completely crazy symptom spotting in the lead up to my period each month hoping it’s a sign of pregnancy. I started to try and control everything even more than I already was. I was temperature charting to make sure I was ovulating, monitoring cervical fluid (a word you never know about until you start trying!), keeping a symptom diary, started acupuncture and fertility herbs, cutting back on exercise, being even stricter with diet, doing fertility meditations and affirmations – all in an attempt to control something that was completely out of my control. We also started trying to have sex even more around ovulation, and as any of you who may have taken a while to fall pregnant will know, it becomes very clinical very quickly and you end up having to do it at times you are exhausted and can’t think of anything worse to do. Not a great way to spice up a marriage.

Lesson 3 – Unexplained fertility can feel like blank check, go to a bulk billed clinic first

As we approached the 12 month mark, we’d had enough. So we did all the usual fertility checks, sperm, blood tests, ultrasounds and everything came back with a gold star. Our fertility specialist put us in that horrible category I had read about on forums labelled ‘unexplained fertility’.

Now the problem I found with unexplained fertility is it means they have no idea how to fix it (other than spending your money). There is no medical intervention for something that is unexplained. They honestly don’t know what to do so it feels like you just get this cookie cutter approach that ends up in multiple cycles doing the exact same thing. Given how much we wanted to have a baby, our specialist recommended we start IVF. We went with the best clinic in the country, with course the highest price tag. We have spent circa $120,000 out-of-pocket on IVF. I didn’t know at the beginning that there were bulk-billed IVF clinics in Australia. I since have had friends have babies through these clinics (some even after they drained their bank accounts at the private ones and had no other option). The main difference as I understand is that you don’t have one dedicated doctor – it’s a team but the science and embryology is the same. In hindsight, this is what we would have started with. It removes so much of the financial burden and if you need more specialist IVF intervention down the road (like surrogacy or donor) you can go to the private clinics then.

Lesson 4 – IVF is not the holy grail, really try to understand what the success rates mean

So the motto of the first clinic we went to was “one cycle, one family”. They pride themselves on women only having to do one egg collection cycle in order to get enough embryos for their family (on average 2 children). We were filled with renewed hope. We had friends who had been though IVF and had a baby. I didn’t know anyone at that point who had been through IVF and didn’t have a baby. Again the doctors marvelled at how young and healthy we were and that we should respond well. One thing I wish I took more time to really understand before we started (so that it managed my expectations) is that for a woman aged 30-35 years old, there is only a 30-40% success rate of each embryo transfer. So that’s assuming you get a healthy embryo which can be challenging in itself. Think about it another way – that means for every embryo transfer, 60-70% of women are not pregnant. That is a huge failure rate for something that takes such a physical, emotional and financial toll on you. And that statistic drops further and very rapidly after 35. I had always thought IVF was the ‘holy grail’ and saw women in their late 40s & 50s having babies via IVF on tv. Clever clever marketing. I always try to remember that IVF is a multi-billion dollar industry and has a very good sales pitch.

Lesson 5 – IVF can be equally tough on you emotionally as it is physically

I am fortunate that I mostly coped well with the physical aspects of IVF (except one bout of OHSS which was so painful) but I empathize deeply for how tough it is for some women. I can’t imagine how hard it is for them and have so much respect that they persevere through it. I was so nervous the first injection I did into my tummy but after that, it was relatively easy for me. All the blood tests, scans, tablets, injections, pessaries (these are super gross tablets up your fun zone) were just part of the plan for me – all I had to do was execute it (which is what I am good at). Our first cycle we got 10 eggs and were over the moon.

I was recovering at home the next day when the phone rang. The embryologist informed us that we had a complete fertilisation failure, something that is incredibly rare to see when ICSI (direct sperm injection) is used. No one had ever mentioned to us this was a possibility. I fell to the ground and cried uncontrollably. Getting bad news normally is hard but when I am jacked up on hormones, there is just nothing I can do about it. Basically they explained that either the sperm or egg didn’t have the energy required to fertilise and there is a high calcium media they can use on the next cycle to help with this issue. Whilst we still don’t have an answer to our unexplained fertility, this was helpful for us to reconcile that falling pregnant naturally was never going to happen for us so we made the right call trying IVF. The emotional toll IVF had on me was so much greater than I had ever expected. It can come at any moment, whether it’s not enough mature eggs, your uterine lining is too thin this month, an embryo didn’t thaw properly or a bloody admin error! There are so many tiny steps that I was emotionally unprepared to be so overwhelmed by with IVF. We only talk about the big picture physical stuff like injections and surgeries and need to prepare couples for the tiny emotional things that add up very quickly so they can be more prepared.

So we picked ourselves up and started round 2. The high calcium media worked and we had healthy embryos! After the egg collection, the embryologist monitor them for 5 days in their incubators. We even had some videos to see the cell development which was pretty cool. Then on day 5, if there is a healthy embryo (now called a ‘blastocyst’) they transfer it back to the uterus and you just cross your fingers and hope your period doesn’t arrive 7-10 days later! They also freeze any remaining embryos in storage for you. There are a lot of articles and talk out there about the ‘two-week wait’ and how tough it is. They are not wrong. The only pearl of wisdom I have is distraction is key – this is a time to keep social and healthy. Book a facial, see a friend and just keep your mind off your uterus. We coped with so many emotional IVF cycles with laughter as the main medicine, so do whatever you need to make light of the situation and laugh especially with your partner. I even remember him showing me funny fail videos in a waiting room one day just to lighten the mood!

Lesson 6 - miscarriages can be ‘missed’ - you don’t always wake up because you are bleeding

From memory, our first pregnancy was maybe after 2 embryo transfers. It was the happiest and most relieved I had ever been. I felt like a weight had been lifted off me. We knew there was a small chance of miscarriage so only told our immediate family and closest friends. Many of them didn’t know about the IVF and challenges we had been through so to say they were happy for us was a understatement.

We had a 7-week viability scan before being transferred from the fertility specialist to our Obstetrician. All had been going well and we were excited to hear the heartbeat for the first time. The experience of this ultrasound is one of the hardest of my life. It felt surreal. The technician doing the scan wasn’t saying anything to us and I knew from other scans I had seen that mine didn’t look like it was meant to. There was no heartbeat. A more senior doctor came in and asked us to move into a different room. If any of you are in this situation, be prepared as this is the ‘bad news’ room. We had miscarried.  I have no memory of what that doctor said, just a feeling like my heart had been ripped out of me. I cried hysterically and my husband just held me. In movies, women who miscarried always seemed to wake up in the middle of the night because they were bleeding and their loving husband would take them to the hospital where the scan would confirm the miscarriage. I didn’t really think that it was possible to miscarry and not know it. My hormone levels were still high and there was no sign or symptom for this. The other cherry on top of the sundae when getting bad news in these clinics, is you hear other people’s healthy heat beat scans and see the big beautiful bellies around you. Torture.

50% of miscarriages happen because the embryo has the wrong number of chromosomes. This was true for us in this case. Our specialist recommend a D&C surgery so they could test the tissue. This happened maybe 2-3 days later. You go from being on cloud nine, to recovering from yet another surgery, knowing you are no longer pregnant but still feeling it as the hormones take more time to leave your system after. Talk about strength and character building!

Lesson 7 – PGS testing doesn’t eliminate miscarriages

We unfortunately had 4 further early miscarriages during IVF. So in addition to our unexplained fertility, we now had recurrent miscarriage to add in the mix. We did 5 egg collections total and transferred around 12 healthy day 5 blastocysts across a 12-18 month period. We always got around 3-5 blastocysts from an egg collection which the clinic told us was a great response.

The only different ‘treatment’ during all these cycles was adding PGS testing after our first miscarriage was confirmed to be chromosomally abnormal. PGS stands for preimplantation genetic screening and is basically where the embryologist removes one or more cells of a day 5 embryo to test for chromosomal normalcy. This is the main tool the clinics use for recurrent miscarriage. It can’t always be done depending on the embryo but we were able to a few times which confirmed we did make chromosomally normal embryos which was good news. Then our 4th miscarriage was with a PGS tested embryo. We thought this was going to be the one when we found out we were pregnant. We were so frustrated as the only medical explanation we had for this was ‘it takes a lot to make a health baby’. They just don’t know what causes the other 50% of miscarriages. Know that you are not alone though.

Lesson 8 – Waiting to naturally miscarry has consequences

So as we knew this was embryo was chromosomally normal, a D&C wasn’t necessary and the doctor thought I would naturally miscarry. It was a strange feeling to be waiting to miscarry knowing I was carrying a unviable pregnancy. I don’t wish it on anyone. I carried it for 10 weeks before having the D&C anyway and unfortunately the pregnancy had caused extensive damage and scaring in my uterus. We had to cancel the next 3 IVF cycles as my uterine lining didn’t recover. I had multiple hysteroscopies & laproposocy to try and fix the scarring which in the end, just needed time off IVF to naturally recover.

As you may know from my other articles, it was at this point in our IVF treatment I was diagnosed with cancer and we pushed pause on all things baby. Check out my other articles on if you are interested in our more recent fertility updates and my cancer experience.

So what I am grateful for with this whole IVF chapter? I am still so grateful I went through IVF as I would have lived a life of regret had I not. I am grateful to live in a country with access to healthcare and IVF and that we had the financial resources to be able to keep going. Most of all, I am grateful to my husband, who was my north star through all this.