The termelectivewas purposely left out of the ASRM guidance, as infertility treatment is notelective, says Dr. Kawwass.
The coronavirus will certainly have an impact on those numbers for 2020 and 2021.
Heres what they had to say.
Margherita Maniscalco/EyeEm/Adobe Stock
My surgery was like a light at the end of the tunnel.
I had something to grasp on to.
MAELIE FORTMAN, PORT ST. LUICE, FLORIDA, as told to Sara Gaynes Levy
Ive had twomiscarriages.
My husband and I decided to start trying to have a baby in June of 2018.
I found out I was pregnant for the first time in December.
We thought, Wow, this is fantastic.
We were both really excited.
In mid January I found out Id had a miscarriagethere was no heartbeat.
After two in one year, I found a new OB who had me undergo some testing.
It needs surgery, and I ended up having to go to an IVF specialist.
The surgery was scheduled for late March.
Everything was moving along, but I started to see that this pandemic was happening.
In mid March I reached out to the doctors office saying, Have you heard anything?
Is there any chance the surgery will be canceled?
And they just told me, Listen, if anything happens we will notify you as soon as possible.
But then it got canceled.
I was so shocked and disappointed.
I did not take the news very well when the surgery was canceled.
Unfortunately, my father passed away last month.
So to me, that surgery was like a light at the end of the tunnel.
I had something to grasp on to.
And when that disappeared, I absolutely just did not cope very well.
I took maybe a couple of days to be very much in my feelings about it.
As much as we want to move on and move forward, we have to accept that.
I know that my egg reserve levels are lower than Id like.
There is a ticking clock here; theres a timeline here.
And Ihaveconceived naturally twice.
My IVF doctor did mention, Youcouldtry again, though theres obviously that risk of losing the pregnancy.
And I was like, There is no way.
My father just passed away.
If I go through a third miscarriage, I will lose it.
Thats not even an option.
But it sucks for every single person who is dealing with this.
Knowing that were not going in for another treatment for who knows how long?
It feels like another loss.
In the last year we found a fertility doctor we loved.
But we loved her from the beginning.
When we started this journey, we had a big discussion around our finances.
And that in itself was such a financial burden.
We didnt have any friends we wanted to use.
We realized that we wanted a family so badly that everything else could wait.
If it was date nights or going out to dinner, we were just going to cook at home.
If we had house projects, we would do them once we were pregnant and pretty far progressed.
We were gonna make it work no matter what that looked like financially.
When I hit 13 weeks, we announced it to everyone on social media.
And then at the end of that week, we had another appointment.
There was no heartbeat.
We had to re-announce our loss.
Trying to find clarity and lessons and just trying to pick yourself back up was excruciating.
We may close tomorrow.
It could be fine.
A few days later was when the email went out that all appointments were being canceled.
They werent doing any more fertility treatments.
I was at work when I got it, and I had a full-blown panic attack.
And its not really like we can do stuff at home [to help with conception].
I was really heartbroken.
This is the real deal.
Everything has officially stopped.
I will very much volunteer that Im heartbroken, and Im discouraged, and Im angry.
Im still trying to sort through the emotions that come with loss and miscarriage.
Knowing that were not going in for another treatment for who knows how long?
It feels like another loss.
Im definitely still emotional.
I still have moments and periods where I kind of just cry with myself and ask the universe Why?
and When is it going to be over?
It feels so open-ended.
Even motivation to stay active and stay clear in your headits a lot.
But I dont want to wallow in it.
There is nothing I can do about it.
Right now, its survival mode.
Its making it through the day, every day, one day at a time.
Because thats all I can do.
We got pretty lucky, I guess, and we got pregnant in March or April.
But I miscarried that pregnancy very early.
Over the course of the next eight months, we experienced three more miscarriages.
Some of the genetic material in his chromosomes are swapped.
Its not a thing that can be fixed or go away.
So it was recommended to us that we start IVF.
We started simulation in February, and I had my egg retrieval in early March.
But it would have been the same odds of miscarriage as if wed conceived naturally.
I reached out to the clinic because I could tell everything around us was starting to close up.
Thats when I found out I couldnt go through with the fertility treatments as planned.
Heres the thing: You have to go on birth control to prep for an embryo transfer.
So I had two options from there.
It was a really tough decision, but we decided to not go back on birth control.
One of the main reasons that theyve recommended stopping fertility treatments is for hospital capacity if something goes wrong.
Butand this is an unfortunate thing to know about yourselfwe know that we tend to miscarry early.
We dont really need any medical assistance with it, and we know how to assess when its over.
So we thought, Lets just keep going.
We dont know how long this is going to last.
In my mind its better to have tried than to just wait.
I think it ended up being better to get the news in the order that we did.
I think this would feel a lot harder if we had not gotten any normal embryos.
Its been weird going back to trying to conceive naturally.
Im doing all the charting and tracking and stuff again.
Were both home, and for that its been very convenient!
There was a real relief in that.
Theyre keeping our embryos frozen for six months.
That kind of adds some extra pressure on this as well.
That was powerful to see.
Weve talked it up so much.
We said, Were starting IVF, this is our year.
We might still get the pregnancy out of it, hopefully.
But it was really tough to realize: Were not going to get the baby.
