Category: Baby Velvet

4 IVF Cycles
105 Shots
$65,000
2.5 years
Zero babies

X and I spent all night debating all the finer points of IVF and everything we’ve learned. While I love Shady Grove, and will continue to recommend them to anyone who asks, I have found their downside. It’s not just theirs, but that of many other clinics, and why all this really is just a big business. No matter what a doctor says about how he/she wants to help you “get your baby,” they won’t do so at a cost. I’ll get to that in a minute.

X had the foresight to pay for a multi-cycle discount which gave us the 2nd IVF at half price. His theory was that if we paid for the 2nd one, they had more incentive to make the first one work. He said it was sort of like insurance. (Remember, X gets hot down there for insurance products.) The first IVF didn’t work. No surprise there, I just expect the bad news now. When we started up the next round it was almost surreal. I literally could not believe I was getting the shots again.

Shady Grove changed the meds because I didn’t respond well the prior time. This time, as I went in for daily blood tests and sonograms, it sounded like we were hitting home runs all over the place.   But, this is the lottery where you win, then they start taking money away from you and leave you with nothing.

1st IVF: 15 eggs retrieved, 13 fertilized, 7 started dividing and only 4 were barely alive at day 3.
2nd IVF: Natural, no meds. 1 egg retrieved. Reached 5 day blastocyst, i.e. “the best it gets.”
3rd IVF: 7 eggs retrieved, 2 fertilized and started dividing and were put back in at day 3.
4th IVF: 10 eggs retrieved, 6 fertilized and started dividing and all 6 continued through to day 4. By day 5, 2 died and we were down to 4 eggs, a few of which were slowing in growth.

See how those numbers sound so good at first, but then every day after the egg retrieval, you keep losing?

They choose the strongest 2 embryos to put back in, and will freeze what is left as long it is a blastocyst. This means that if you have 6 embryos that are growing and 2 become blastocysts, they will put those two in. And guess what happens to the other 4? They aren’t good enough for their Kenmore’s apparently, so they throw them out.

This is exactly what happened to us. We asked if I could have just one of those other embryos put in with the two good quality ones, and they said no – two is their max. Their position is if it is not a blastocyst at day 5, then it would “most likely” not survive a freeze/thaw. Well, how does that explain my friend who has a 6 year old right now who was one of these “bad quality undesirable” embryos? How does it explain all the other women on message boards who had frozen, low quality, highly fragmented embryos put back in that resulted in a child?

You may be asking, why won’t the clinics just let you have your embryos and give them a chance? Because every failed embryo transfer, whether fresh or frozen, goes against a clinic’s stats. So they rely on statistics while we leverage our assets preparing for the next step and wonder if our child just got flushed into the Potomac.

So all this bodes the question that we’ve been debating all night. Most women get few, if any blastocysts. Is it worth it to spend all this money and go through the financial, physical and emotional drain to get the 2 embryos they’ll allow you on transfer day, knowing that the other ones will be thrown away?

I never expected this reaction but I cried as I told X tonight, I feel like someone actually took a baby away from us.

No more IVF for me. It’s one thing if the embryos are put inside you and don’t result in a pregnancy, but it’s a whole other ballgame if they never even allow them the chance to try.

Warning: This post is incredibly detailed with medical jargon you may find coma-inducing.You don’t have to read it all…I bolded the important parts. Mostly I want to solidify its place in the event I can help some poor woman in the future.

In most cases, I love it when something I didn’t understand finally makes itself clear to me. I also love it when I’m right. Not this time.

We just finished the IVF with Shady Grove. We don’t know much yet but I’ll report in when we do. I’m not hopeful since I’ve endured this before, only to have it fail.   Having gone through the whole process at Shady Grove and finding it 1000 times better, more professional and easier than the other stimulated IVF we did, I have learned a ton.

My Ob/Gyn, who I love, recommended two years ago we see Dr. Asmar at Washington Fertility.   We liked him and felt like he could help us, so we began the IVF process. From the 2nd or 3rd day of the shots I was sick. I could not understand how friends of mine did this 5 and 6 times. When I reached the point where I was homicidal and knew my body could take no more, Dr. Asmar said I needed to do one more day of shots. I was beside myself. I couldn’t believe it. I knew something was wrong with my body, we had already lost faith in them when they lost X’s sperm, when they overcharged us, when they routinely made us wait an hour even though the office was empty, when their two receptionists treated us like crap, but I just knew something was wrong. From what I know now, it appears that I was overstimulated.

When your follicles are overstimulated, you will get tons of eggs, but few of them are viable. There were 15 eggs retrieved from me on Friday, February 5, 2010 at 8:30 a.m. I went home to bed. X came in around mid-afternoon and said, “Good news, 13 of the 15 eggs fertilized!” We were so happy. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove is that the eggs take about 24 hours to “fertilize.” So a phone call 6 hours later from Washington Fertility stating 13 fertilized eggs was clearly a lie.

That evening, as it started snowing the Great Snowstorm that gave the DC area 3 feet of snow, X and I discussed how wonderful it would be to have enough embryos frozen that we could have a few kids off this one IVF cycle. We lost power that evening, as did most of the metro area. X said to me at 11:00 Friday night, “I hope they didn’t lose power at the lab.” Suddenly our minds went to our 13 little embryos, the little Velvet/X combos and my heart sank. They had told us at Washington Fertility that they planned to stay at the lab all weekend in anticipation of the storm, but as the snow pounded the city, we didn’t hear anything all weekend long. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove is that you should get a daily phone call after egg retrieval. The day after retrieval they call with a fertilization report. The second day they call to tell you when to expect the embryos will be transferred. For a variety of reasons they determine at this point whether you should transfer the embryos on day 3 or 5 post retrieval. We received no such call from Dr. Asmar’s office at Washington Fertility.

Monday morning, February 8, 2010, the medicine cocktail I was still taking had burned through my esophagus so badly I hadn’t been able to eat all weekend without throwing it back up. Dr. Asmar’s office called to say that “only 7 eggs survived the weekend and only 3 were dividing normally.” Because they weren’t even decent quality, they recommended an immediate transfer. We asked for a delay because of my vomiting issue (I seriously just wanted my fucking body to be normal again) and he said no, this was important to do today as the embryos typically do better inside the mother. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove is that this transfer should be scheduled the day prior, and you shouldn’t receive a panicky phone call from your allegedly competent doctor telling you to come right away.

When we got to Washington Fertility they showed us a picture of 6 embryos and said that a 4th had “started to divide.” We never did find out why they said 7 embryos on the phone but only showed us 6. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove is that an egg doesn’t just suddenly start dividing 3 days later. If they are going to arrest development it’s early in the process, and then they don’t keep going. Because we got no phone calls from Friday afternoon with our “fake” fertilization report, until Monday morning’s panicked “you have to come right away,” it’s obvious that these people lied. They were NOT in the lab at all, because if they were, we would have received calls, and not all of those eggs would have died. The lab needs to wash, change fluids, etc, and this probably wasn’t done. It appears they left the embryos to fend for themselves and went home to shovel their driveways.

When you reach the end of your hormone shots, the clinic calls you and tells you to take a “trigger” shot that tells your follicles to release the eggs. Exactly 36 hours later, they have you go in for an egg retrieval. I had 12 follicles this time but some were sluggish. Based on the sizes, I had thought they would have me go another day on shots, and X and I were prepared for a last minute trip to the pharmacy to pick up more. When Shady Grove called with my directive to take the trigger shot I was sort of stunned. Last IVF I was begging for that shot, but this time, I could have easily gone another day. I asked the nurse why. What we know now from our experience with Shady Grove can be summed up by her response: “Well, we watch for the estrogen jump, and as long as it jumps as much the following day, we keep going. When it levels off, your body is going to stop maturing the eggs and you could risk losing the bigger follicles as they will be too old now.”   I went back to look at my records from good old Dr. Asmar.

Before I compare estrogen levels, here’s a tidbit of useful information on Estrogen and proper numbers during IVF:

Exact figures are not possible. As a rough guide, however, a level in the range of 150 to 500 pg/ml is generally considered reasonable for the eighth day of a stimulated cycle. An approximate doubling of this level every 48 hours is considered promising, as a sign of continued good follicle development.

Let’s compare Estrogen Levels for both cycles.

Washington Fertility
Day 5       149
Day 7       489
Day 10   1323
Day 11   3312
Day 12   3458

I didn’t have an appointment on Day 8, but let’s assume I was around 500 just for fun since I was at 489 on Day 7.   Following with the guide above, day 10 I should have been 1000; I was 1323. Day 12, had I been 1000, I should have been 2000; I was 3458. That’s 73% higher than I should have been. Those eggs weren’t over-easy, they were scorched.   While they don’t provide targets of estrogen because every woman is different, it appears from that example above that if you stimulate for 12 days with shots, the max your estrogen should reach is 2000.

Shady Grove
Day 6         189
Day 7         302
Day 9         481
Day 11     1106
Day 12     1380
Day 13     1599

My day 8 estrogen was clearly in the range of 150 – 500 since days 7 and 9 are in that range. It’s safe to assume though that they did it right. I was responding to the meds more slowly, but when the jump from day 9 to 11 was 625 points, then from 11 to 13 it went 493 points, it was time to trigger.

See what happened at Washington Fertility with Dr. Asmar? I was right. I was totally overstimulated, could go no further physically and they should have given me the trigger shot when I asked for it. The jump in estrogen from 1323 to 3312 was the big one, but then the fact it went only another 140 points? Dr. Asmar totally missed the entire window of opportunity and all that pain, torture and money was for nothing because my eggs weren’t viable. Couple that with the fact they weren’t at that lab that weekend, and those embryos didn’t stand a chance. I love being right, but this time it’s heartbreaking.

After my experience at Washington Fertility, I left some reviews on various doctor review sites. Like clockwork, their stupid nurses would come in right after me and leave positive reviews. Except they are soooo stupid because you can tell it’s them writing the reviews based on what they say. On one of the sites they even wrote “Velvet we know who you are and we’ll call your job and tell them you’re crazy.”   Um….nice. Except that their English isn’t that proper.   Washington Fertility has been on a massive PR parade. They also since redesigned their website and put up testimonials that are clearly fake…just as fake as their fertility reports.

Dominion called me on Friday. I saw the number on my phone and wondered wtf could they want. Insurance info. I don’t know why as most insurance has no coverage for IVF, mine included. She said she wanted to check as they may cover the pregnancy test next week and blah blah. I’m on an HMO so I told her I doubted it because of the whole referral nonsense. So 2 minutes later calls back to say I was right, and there’s no coverage, and did we want to “self-pay” for the remaining visits. I was like, “What remaining visits?” She goes on to explain that if I get a positive pregnancy test, they will have me come in for “monitoring” every few days for 8 FUCKING WEEKS. I was like, “Are you joking???” I mean, come the fuck on, I cannot get up and drive in the opposite direction from work every other day at 7 a.m. for you to add me to your statistics pile.

I said “I don’t understand. If I were to get pregnant by normal customs, I’d pee on a stick and show up at my ob/gyn within a few weeks. Why do I need 8 weeks of monitoring if it isn’t included and doesn’t have any ob/gyn care? I can go to my ob/gyn and get it covered by insurance.”   Ah ha. Caught you. She said if I wanted to go to my ob I could (yeah? thanks, but I didn’t need your permission) and that I didn’t have to do the monitoring. I said, “That’s good because after what you guys did to me the other day I’m not committing to anything until we get resolution from the doctors.” That shut her up.

X said, “this is like when you get a cruise for cheap and they make you buy the excursions because that’s where they make all their money, or when you buy a house and then get all the upgrades, which they mark up like 100%.” Yup. How the hell they can charge $5000 for a natural cycle and then have the nerve to call and try to trick you into this added 8 weeks of bullshit is beyond me.

I was texting with my friend this morning about stupid things people say when you’re in a crisis. The roots of this conversation of course were based on our mutual fertility struggles. I’m making the disclaimer that if anyone commented with any of these, I’m sorry, but this is my list of shit NOT to say to someone with fertility issues until you know exactly what the problems are. (And even then, they probably considered all these choices and opted not to do them for one reason or another.)

* Why don’t you adopt? (It’s not about “a kid,” it’s about “our kid.”)
* How about donor sperm? (X’s sperm work. There’s just a roadblock.)
* How about donor eggs? (My eggs are perfectly fine. In fact, I am “reproductively younger” than my chronological age, whatever the fuck that means.)
* How about a surrogate? (Okay, this is by far the stupidest thing to say to someone. It is not carrying the child that is the problem. It’s getting X’s stuff to my stuff to make el bebe. Hiring a surrogate would help our problem as much as taking a vitamin when you have a headache.)
* I’m sure there’s more but I can’t think of it right now.

I had a friend who was slowly experiencing the loss of her husband. She told me that people would say the stupidest things to her, and I always believed her but I felt like giving people the benefit of the doubt was necessary. They meant well, and I know people in this case mean well, but still, it’s not helpful and then it forces me into explaining that all the parts work, the roads are just closed. And then I get so discouraged that I start trolling the fertility message boards and let me tell you – those are scary places. They all talk in code and I don’t get what the hell they are saying. I have to google almost everything they write. Then I realized that these women all live for and are defined by their ability to conceive. It consumes them.

I’ve peed on my fair share of sticks (all negative,) but thankfully, it’s not the only thing propping up my whole world.

I really appreciate everyone’s thoughts, comments and well wishes. Because the blog reposts to my Facebook, I had the chance to catch up with people who I haven’t chatted with in years, when the post was plastered on my wall.

What is amazing is how many people I know have been touched by fertility issues. It makes me wonder what is so different now from 40, 100, 1000 years ago when there were no assisted reproductive techniques. What did people do? Because damn if that waiting room at Dominion wasn’t filled every time we went there. It makes me wonder if the stresses of life are just too much for people to provide the right environment for conception, or if this is just a medical scam.

This is clearly big business. In hindsight, perhaps we should have stuck with Shady Grove. One of my friends commented as much, and I wanted to actually address this with a proper answer. Shady Grove was our first stop. My brain could not get around the idea that we would have to do IVF when there was only a vasectomy in the way. It’s like driving down the road, seeing a pothole, and instead of driving around it you stop the car and get in an airplane to fly over it. It just seemed extreme, and that there were a bunch of stops along the way to full blown IVF.

What I also hated about Shady Grove was before X and I got our asses to touch the visitor’s chairs in their office, they were pulling out this laminated card with their 60% success rate statistics. It felt like an infomercial.   What I also don’t like about them is that they don’t do Natural Cycle IVF, but if you google natural cycle, Shady Grove is most often first, with a link to the page where they discuss why they don’t think Natural Cycle IVF is worth shit. Yeah, well, obviously that article was written by someone with a penis because any woman who takes all those hormones in the stomach for 3 weeks would never write something so ridiculous.

Washington Fertility was no different. They also reported about a 60% success rate, but I don’t believe them. If he retrieved 15 eggs from me and got a big fat zero, then he’s not doing so well. Especially considering another clinic proved I have healthy, viable eggs with no issues. But back to hindsight being 20/20, I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that if I went through the cycle with Shady Grove and they got 15 eggs, there would have been a baby by now.

I saw three separate doctors after the latest IVF. This wasn’t my choice, but what happened in the procedure necessitated it. I truly do not wish this misery on my worst enemy. I cannot find any evidence online of people having their bladder punctured during an IVF cycle, but of course, if you told me that there would be a million procedures this year and during retrieval one patient would get struck by lightening through the window – that person would be me.

Someone pointed out either here or on Facebook something which X and I have already beaten ourselves up over. We wasted 2 years with these doctors. Two years. Doctors are not Gods. They don’t know it all. Some of them don’t know shit. You have to take hold of your own healthcare and make your own decisions, and you have to question everything. It seems like they recently lowered the bar for graduating from med school because I never remember doctors being this inept when I was growing up. Or maybe I was just seeing the world through different eyes.

X made me promise not to talk about this, but unfortunately, I’ve reached the end of the line and I need to get it out.

Those of you who can get pregnant the normal way should thank your lucky stars. X had a vasectomy when he was married to the beast and two years ago we decided we might like to have a baby. My ob/gyn said that all they would do is have a urologist extract sperm from X and put it into a turkey baster into me, and voila. Since the only thing standing in our way was the snip, we researched the best urologists for this, found one was in DC and met with him. We also discussed reversing the vasectomy. He said, “No problem, but just go to Shady Grove and get the tests to make sure Velvet doesn’t have any issues on her side. You don’t want to reverse a vasectomy only to find out she has a blockage or something.” Fair enough.

Here’s my Review of Shady Grove Fertility:
April, 2009. We met with some doc there and began the battery of tests. Everything came back better than normal, and we went back to Shady Grove and said, “Okay, when can we do the artificial insemination?” They said, “you won’t get enough sperm so you have to do full IVF.” I’m really cutting to the chase on this, but this was over about a month of time because these tests are all on certain days of your cycle. I felt cheated, like, why did I bother going through these tests if they were just going to send me to the last stop of IVF anyway? I felt like they were just giving us the hard-sell into their most profitable procedure and we never went back.

My ob/gyn recommended we go to Washington Fertility. I love my ob/gyn and I thought that her recommendation would be the right one.

Here’s my Review of Washington Fertility:
June, 2009: X and I instantly liked the one doctor at Washington Fertility. He seemed like a nice guy and very interested in helping us. He said, “If you only want one child, why reverse a vasectomy? Just do IVF. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around this, but finally in the Fall of 2009 we agreed we would go this route. It seemed so unbelievable that something as simple as a vasectomy was causing all this trouble. When we agreed to start the process in January, 2010, the trouble started. Despite the nurse’s orders that I needed to absolutely call on Day 1 of my period, the witches at the front desk treated me like crap and said to “call back next week,” making me miss an entire month. When they started charging X’s credit card, they double charged a bunch of things and we couldn’t even decipher what they had done. When we questioned what they charged, they got nasty and belligerent and for the rest of the weeks we went there, they wouldn’t even look at us or speak to us. We addressed this with the doctor and he assured us he would review our charges.

During the process, I got very sick. It’s not easy to take 3 hormone shots a night in the stomach and get progressively sicker each day. I gained 20 lbs and was completely miserable. Just the idea of clothes touching my body was painful. I was sick to my stomach, couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink and couldn’t go to the bathroom. Despite the fact that I developed 18 follicles – totally unheard of for a 36 year old – they kept wanting to do “one more day” of meds. I had to put my foot down and say that I couldn’t take anymore. X tried to call their emergency line and paged the doctor several times. He never called back. When they looked at X’s sperm, they said it was all dead, and we would need to arrange for another extraction. X called his doc who was totally shocked and said, “I just left there and there were 3 vials of live sperm.” For 2 hours we were on the phone between docs and labs trying to figure out the truth and whose sperm they were speaking about. We still don’t know.

They retrieved 15 eggs from me (not all follicles have an egg inside) and 13 fertilized. Again, these are insane numbers for a 36, almost 37 year old. That weekend we had a big old snowstorm and the entire metro area lost power. They claim to have generators but I’m not sure. All the eggs died except 4 very weak ones. They recommended we get all 4 implanted. Needless to say, I didn’t get pregnant. During the transfer of the 4 embryos Dr. Asmar literally kept asking the lab assistant, “Here? How about here?” If you believe the gods of google, the transfer is the most important part of the process, for one wrong move and the embryos won’t stick. And Dr. Asmar had no clue where to put them. The lab tech had to tell him.

The way Dr. Asmar and his staff treated us was a disaster, but it got worse. I put reviews online attesting to my experience and the staff put reviews right behind me saying “We know who you are and we’re going to tell your office how crazy you are so you lose all your clients.” I screen capped it all. One may wonder how I know it was them. Because the time stamp was pretty close to the time stamp on my site stats and on our company site stats and on this blog, with a big old “WASHINGTON FERTILITY” in the referrer line. When you’re a stupid receptionist at an incompetent doctor’s office, I wouldn’t expect you to understand how stats work, but you get a big FAIL for that you dumb bitch.

We were told to go to Dominion Fertility and so we requested our records from Washington Fertility. It took 4 very painful attempts to get ALL the records. They kept playing games and we ended up filing complaints on Washington Fertility for HIPAA violations and with the medical board for the doctor’s lack of care.

Then the reality sunk in. It’s not the money. It’s not the incompetence. It’s not the lack of a baby. It’s that nagging feeling about the “lost” sperm, the 15 eggs and the question of their status, and the fear that my egg or X’s sperm went into someone else’s body. When you conceive a child through sex, these are things that never cross your mind.

A year later, we continue to get bills from the for “sperm storage” despite the fact that they have said several times there was none left. We continue to send letters asking Dr. Asmar why he still charges us for sperm and he refuses to answer. This, along with withholding records, is also a HIPAA violation. We filed another complaint this week.

We decided to go to Dominion Fertility and do the Natural Cycle IVF. (No meds, they just wait on your one egg to pop, then grab it.) I’m not sure I can do a review of this facility at this point as I just had my one lone egg retrieved this morning. However, I can tell you this much. I will never do IVF again.

While retrieving the egg, they poked a hole through my bladder and blood came out where pee should be, and they had to give me a catheter for 2 hours while the urine cleared. If it didn’t clear, I would have had to wear a pee bag for 2 days. They agreed to remove the bag and I have never felt such pain in my life. The nurse ran out of the room and came back in with another nurse who said, “Didn’t you deflate the balloon in her bladder first?” It was like trying to get a golf ball out my pee hole.   At this point I was in tears, and completely hysterical. I’m squeamish with medical procedures but nothing grosses me out more than the urinary tract. I had kidney stones once and it was a pretty miserable experience getting a catheter but this was 100 times worse.

I practically ran out of there in tears and it’s hard to believe that anyone in this fertility game really knows what they are doing. There’s just a fucking vasectomy standing in our way (that has since been reversed and it didn’t work) and no one can help us without putting me through physical and emotional pain I just never thought I would know in my life.

So for all of you women who can have a baby the normal way, please, thank God, Gucci, or whoever you thank, and be so happy you don’t have to endure this.

And there you have it. The reason that for the last year I’ve been basically MIA. This has occupied a lot of my time and I’ve been pretty depressed from it.