IVF = Double trouble? Actually not always!
When I had IVF with Erin everyone used to say… wow what if you have twins, they are much more popular than singletons in IVF.
True… they are but only in certain circumstances. Otherwise your chances of twins are the same as everyone else’s.
How it works is you have “egg collection” (eggs are removed and mixed with sperm). Every day after this the hospital ring at a set time and tell you how many embryos survive- yep pretty heart wrenching.
On the third day they call and confirm how many you have. At this stage I had 5 left. You then have a choice- you can put in two embryos (which therefore increases your chance for twins).
The other option you have is to take the Embryos to blastocyst. Blastocysts are when the embryos have lived outside your body for an additional two days.
When you have a Blastocyst egg you only have one returned the womb which therefore leaves you with the same chances of having twins as a normal pregnancy.
I don’t know which is more popular or works better but I have heard that it’s better to have two put in, with the hope that one with attach if you are older or don’t have many eggs at the 3 days stage. This is mainly because the risk of them surviving the blastocyst stage isn’t huge. I lost two during this stage.
Erin was one of 3 who ended up surviving blastocyst. She was the only embryo I had inserted and thankfully she took to my womb. There wasn’t anymore chance of twins than a normal pregnancy- although my mum was a twin!!
Have you had IVF? Did you have blastocyst or two eggs put in? Which worked for you and were they twins??
Oh this is really interesting. I knew so little about IVF and it’s fab you’re telling your story like this. You hear the word but you don’t really know the ins and outs
Thank you, it’s one of those things that when I went through it I wished there was more out there x
As I tweeted yesterday – this has brought so much back to me. As a teacher I don’t tend to write about ultra-personal stuff on my blog but I don’t mind putting here that we did end up with the stereotype due to putting 2 eggs back. I was deemed ‘geriatric’ in fertility terms (ha ha – 36 at the time!) so went with the professional advice. Also, I only had 4 eggs collected and from that only 2 made it to embryo so it seems destiny really…. :-). Great post – people need to know more about this stuff – I have totally forgotten all the jargon. One day I’ll write about our ‘journey’ I’m sure xx