Success stories after multiple attempts – insight from IVF coordinator

We won’t check if you are married or if you are actually a couple by showing pictures or something like that. What we need is that the male partner signs the documents where he needs to agree with the treatment either he will come with you to our clinic and sign it at the clinic. If you’re using a donor, or you will have to go to a notary in his country and sign the document and the identification with the notary to make sure that it’s him who is signing the document. Then, you come with this original signed identified by a notary document to our clinic. You sign it there so that you can have the treatment here.

Something I recommend or is recommended by our embryologist is, for example, the EmbryoGlue or Assisted Hatching, which is something that we recommend more, but it depends if it’s possible. Sometimes, the embryos on the day of the transfer are already hatching, so it is not necessary to do the assisted hatching. In that case, you can do the EmbryoGlue. If you’re not asking me about the laboratory techniques, but you’re thinking about what you can do personally for the transfer to be successful, very important is to be positive, about the transfer. If you think from the beginning that it can’t work and won’t work, it will not work, also avoiding stress is very important. Another thing, that we recommend not to do after the transfer is to have hot showers or to go to saunas and doing, something that is not recommended during the whole pregnancy like lifting heavy things. Also, avoid jumping, you can walk normally, but it’s better to avoid running very fast, all of those things should be avoided during the whole pregnancy. I also suggest acupuncture sometimes. We have really good results with that, so before and after transfer. I think that is what can help you as well.

The Gynem clinic is only doing the treatment for the surrogate mother and for the patient, however, we are not organizing the surrogacy, so you have to find your own surrogate mother, and you need to have an agreement signed so that we are allowed to do the treatment. All 3 of you will have a consultation with us, usually via skype, where also the doctor has to inform the surrogate mother or to check that she knows what she will be going through the whole procedure, the whole pregnancy that it’s not an easy decision. The cost of the surrogacy over the price of the IVF is 1500 EUR, which is the surrogacy fee, we have to do all the administration plus it’s the treatment for the surrogate mother.

Usually, it is the case that she comes from another country because obviously if you come from, let’s say the UK, you bring your surrogate from your country, you won’t find her in our country. I don’t know why, but all of my surrogate mothers that came for the treatments were from Denmark, and it was usually a sister, or it was a best friend of the recipient. It worked out, and we had live births in Denmark.

We don’t have a waiting time for egg donation. However, since there is a long preparation time rather than waiting time, what happens is that after the consultation, you have the time to think about if you’re interested in having the treatment at our clinic if you’re sure about it because of a deposit has to be paid. As soon as the deposit is paid, we start to search for the donor, that usually takes 3 weeks to 1 month, and after this, we need to synchronize the cycles that take maybe 1 to 2 months, and then in total, we have 2 to 3 months of preparation so that we actually, just start with the treatment.

We do offer price packages, we have 2 of them, we have a basic one and a comfortable one. The basic package includes frozen eggs that are already on stock at our clinic, you have a guarantee of 1 embryo for the transfer, a good quality embryo, which means that it can be even an embryo at day-3. With the other package, we have a comfort package which is with fresh eggs, this package is a little bit unpredictable, let’s say because, of course, we have a donor that comes to the clinic, and we do our best so that she has as many eggs as possible, however, it may be a donor that comes for the first time, which is in most of the cases, and she has 3 eggs only at the day of the egg retrieval.

However, you have a guarantee of 2 blastocysts for the embryo transfer. If she doesn’t have a sufficient number of eggs, we create, let’s say 1 blastocyst day-5, we will create another blastocyst for later use, so we can transfer this one, and then in the meantime, we will prepare another embryo, which we can transfer, and use it for a frozen embryo transfer in the future. We can, of course, discuss that, or you can contact me via email, and I would send you everything via email plus the price list, and we can discuss that h in person.

Yes, so after the egg retrieval both in the egg donation and IVF, we update you every day regarding the embryo development. First, one day after the egg retrieval, we inform you how many eggs were fertilized, and then from the next day, we inform you how many cells each embryo has, and then we inform you about the quality of the embryos. That is something we do during the cultivation, and then if you choose to have the Embryoscope after your treatment, we can send you a video, it takes maybe 30 seconds up to one minute – the embryo development or cultivation until the day-5 when we transfer it into the uterus.

It is possible to choose an embryo thanks to the pre-implantation genetic testing, this is something that is recommended when we have a lot of embryos so that we can choose from. For example, if you have 1 embryo only on the day of the transfer and you are interested in the pre-implantation genetic testing, it doesn’t really make sense to do it. There’s something that is not recommended by our embryologists. If we have 8 embryos then yes, it makes sense to do genetic testing to choose the best-looking embryo.

It is not necessary to really relax too much after the transfer. Usually, our patients start work normally, one week after the transfer day, but of course, it depends on your work. If you need to lift something heavy at work, it is not recommended to continue this work, so it is something that you have to specify depending on your job. I would recommend is to wait 1 week and then go back to your normal life and hope that your life will change completely.

This is something that an embryologist should answer, however, what I get as a coordinator and what you get because you get it from me is that it is evaluated depending if it has fragmentations. Fragmentations usually make the quality of the embryo evaluated as a grade 2. Grade 1 is the best grade, minus 1 is the second-best, grade 2 is still good and everything that is lower than 2, so minus 2, or 3 is not really good and usually doesn’t cultivate till a blastocyst stage, however, what is the evaluation system called I cannot really answer this question.

Unfortunately, in most cases, yes, it is possible to have the IVF when you are less than 40 years old. However, in some cases, doesn’t really have good results, we even had patients that were 26 years old, and they were menopaused, it is really sad because again another patient coming from Switzerland had 3 IVF’s, they had 3 egg donations, now she’s 28 years old and she has as a big file, so, unfortunately, this is not always the case that if you are under 40 years old, the egg donation is not going to be suggested.

During the preparation for the frozen embryo transfer, we recommend checking the endometrium on day 10 of the cycle however, if it is day 9 and day 11, it is fine. The main thing is to measure it before you start using progesterone, and it should be around 10 millimeters, well it is advised that if it is day 10, and the endometrium is more than 7 millimeters thick, it is still thicker and thicker and usually during the transfer it should be from 8 to 12 millimeters thick. Sometimes, it can be even thicker, and in that case, it can be even too much, so we rather prefer not to go over 12 millimeters, so somewhere between 8 and 12 millimeters is ideal, as you mentioned 10 millimeters during the transfer is not necessary. On Day 10, that is too early because it’s still growing, and then on the day of the transfer, it might be too thick, and that is also not something that we are looking for.

There is a fixed price for the standard IVF cycle, which is 2400 EUR. However, it depends if we’re using a pre-selection, if we’re using an Embryoscope, if we are using the EmbryoGlue, assisted hatching. The cycle without medication costs 2 400 EUR at our clinic, and then the medication cost is somewhere between 800 and 1500 EUR depending on the medication type, medication brand, and, of course, the dosage that you need.

I am also sometimes surprised that the protocol for one of my patients doesn’t change the second or the third time if it is the second transfer, that is something that our doctors also do, so the protocol doesn’t change the second time or the third cycle. However, if we already had three cycles and the protocol is the same for the fourth one, there is something wrong. We should already do something before the protocol or maybe during the protocol change the medication type, brand or add something before we do some extra testing maybe, there is something wrong, and there is a waste of embryos, which is a pity. It depends on the case mainly if there is a pregnancy or not, however, if if you already had three times a cycle with the same protocol and the doctor prescribes the fourth time the same protocol, there is something wrong.

To be honest, I have noticed that it depends on the doctor, but usually, it is one week before the transfer, sometimes the day of the transfer, and definitely one week after the transfer. Sometimes, it varies, and it is two weeks before the transfer and two weeks afterward. Sometimes, as you could see to continue, on the other hand, in most cases, one week before the transfer even the day of the egg retrieval, not one week but five days before, so the day of the egg retrieval, the day of the transfer, and then five to seven days after the transfer.