Infertility

This is me just before my second embryo transfer in 2023. We cancelled a trip to Italy to do the transfer and it was worth it. Our daughter arrived early 2024!

To celebrate National Infertility Awareness Week in 2023, I wrote about my IVF experience for PureWow.

“‘Celebrate’ might be the wrong word. I can count on one hand the number of things my husband and I have genuinely celebrated since last March [2022] when we first met with our fertility clinic. However, I realized recently that simply coming out of every appointment, procedure and follow-up call alive is a cause for celebration. This process is physically, emotionally and mentally exhausting. But I’m doing it, one day at a time. If you are in it too, or are about to be in it, or are considering it, I’d like to share some things I’ve learned doing IVF.

I imagined getting pregnant after one round of IVF and calling it a day. I didn’t realize most patients have to do several full rounds to get pregnant. The data on this isn’t great because there are so many variables that lead to a live birth, among women and within a single individual. One major study out of the U.K. found that after six rounds of IVF, 65.3 percent of participants had a live birth. But, this was from 2015 and IVF technology is changing all the time.

Basically, don’t put all the pressure on one cycle. This is a long con, not tableside magic.”

-Excerpt from 14 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting IVF - PureWow, 2023

More fertility writing to come.