Treatments for infertility vary depending on the reason for your infertility. Your Specialist may recommend different treatments including: hormonal therapy, surgical procedures or assisted reproductive technologies (ART) to conceive. ART refers to various methods used to unite sperm and eggs by artificial means, including IVF (In-vitro fertilisation) and ICSI (Intracytoplasmic Sperm Injection).
Our Treatment Process
Medication
During a cycle the female partner will use injections, called follicle stimulating hormones (FSH), to stimulate the ovaries so that multiple follicles grow. It’s the follicle that contains the egg, however it is important to note that not every follicle will contain an egg.
Other injections used include antagonist or agonist injections and the trigger injection. Antagonist or agonist injections prevent ovulation occurring to protect the eggs from being released from the follicles as they grow.
The trigger injection is given just prior to egg collection to start the process of ovulation and prepare the eggs to be collected during the egg collection procedure or oocyte pick up (OPU).
All injections used in IVF are given by the patients themselves at home. They are simple to prepare and use. Your IVF nurse will teach you how to give them with a demonstration and give you an opportunity to practice so you are comfortable.
Injections are given for approximately 10-14 days, however every woman is different and every cycle is different and it will depend how long the follicles take to grow to be the right size to have mature eggs collected.
The Workup
Your specialist and nurses will ask you to attend blood tests and ultrasounds during the stimulation to monitor the growth of the follicles.
These ultrasounds are completed by trained sonographers and nurses at our clinics. The ultrasounds are internal scans as this is the best way to get an accurate picture of the follicles as they grow. The follicles will be measured and counted and relayed back to your specialist to review before the nurses advise you on your progress.
The Procedure
The procedures involved in IVF include both the egg collection procedure (OPU) and embryo transfer.
At Adora fertility all egg collection procedures are completed under anaesthetic in an accredited day surgery by a Fertility Specialist. The OPU takes roughly 20-30 minutes and the recovery in the hospital is approximately two hours. In total you will be at the day surgery for approximately three hours.
Embryo transfer, however is an awake procedure (similar to a pap smear) in which the Fertility Specialist will insert a small catheter with the embryo through the woman’s cervix and into the uterus.
Fertilisation
Between the OPU and embryo transfer the male partner’s sperm and the females eggs will be looked after in our laboratory.
Following fertilisation, which occurs overnight after the OPU, the resulting embryos will usually be grown in the lab for five days before being transferred to the woman’s uterus. During this time the cells continually grow and divide to produce what is referred to as a blastocyst and then transferred back to the female partner to continue to grow into a potential pregnancy.
It’s important to note that not all resulting embryos will grow to blastocyst stage and therefore may not be suitable to be transferred or frozen for use in a Frozen Embryo Treatment cycle at a later date.
Counselling
We understand this is a difficult journey.
Then comes what is commonly referred to as the ‘two week wait’ following embryo transfer. The embryo has been transferred and the couple is waiting for the pregnancy test date to confirm if the embryo has implanted or not. This can be a challenging time on the rollercoaster of an IVF cycle. All Adora clinics have a counsellor available for you to talk to during not only this stage but any stage of the journey.
What’s the next step? Reach out via a web enquiry.
