City doctors say that many couples get disheartened after the initial failure of IVF. However, there are many cases where the patients have been successful in becoming patients in consecutive attempts. Dr Ashwini said, "Recently, I came across a 34-year old woman who was married for eight years. She had not conceived due to very low ovarian reserve (egg reserve). In fact, she had tried IVF four years back elsewhere. She did not get a single egg even after the injection. So, this time, we tried IVF with a donor egg available with us. Though she conceived a baby, it had to be terminated at 12 weeks due to a lethal anomaly." Dr. Ashwini S (has accrued more than 15 years of experience in the field of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, out of which more than 10 years of expertise is exclusively in Infertility, IVF and Assisted Reproductive Techniques) of NU Hospital.
These kinds of cases can disturb any family, especially those who have been trying hard to conceive for a long time. However, we thought it was time to give it one more try. "Hence, we tried another frozen embryo transfer for her in which she failed to conceive. We tried to do a second frozen embryo transfer for her. However, her uterine lining/ endometrium were not growing optimally with the hormones being given externally. Now, we decided to stimulate her ovary with minimal medication and allow the endometrium lining to grow naturally as the egg grows and matures. When we stimulated, we could see three eggs growing in the ovary and also the endometrium was good to go ahead with the frozen embryo transfer. At this stage, I offered her to go ahead with retrieval of the eggs. To our surprise, we got two eggs and one good embryo of her own which were transferred. Thankfully, she conceived with her own egg. However, there were still many challenges. Now, she was presented with cervical incompetence at 19 weeks of pregnancy for which emergency cervical stitches were applied. The pregnancy was pulled with due care up to 34 weeks when she delivered a healthy boy weighing 2.1 kgs", she said.