Q: I just had IVF done and it didn’t work. They implanted two grade 8b eggs. I thought that was good; I guess not. I am so upset. I want to try again but am afraid it will not work again. My question is does it seem to work better the second time around?
A: I am sorry IVF didn’t work for you in the first cycle. I know how devastated you must feel. Do not despair. Remember IVF is great technology. It gives us the best pregnancy rates of all the infertility treatments available to date. But still, not everyone gets pregnant in their very first cycle, so don’t give up.
I think couples going into IVF treatment do better emotionally if they regard their IVF cycle as a little bit of a gamble and a fact finding mission. No one can know going in how they will do in terms of egg production and quality, how well the eggs will fertilize, how many embryos they will have, and whether or not they will have embryos to freeze.
Pregnancy rates in any IVF cycle are dependent on the age of the egg (you are born with all the eggs you will ever have, so your eggs are as old as you are.), how good your ovarian reserve is (this is determined by testing blood on your day of cycle two or three for the hormones FSH, LH, and estradiol), and the quality of the sperm. Your chances of a pregnancy are about the same in the second cycle of IVF as they are in the first, not better. Most of the pregnancies that occur from IVF do occur within three cycles of treatment, so to continue treatment indefinitely without making some changes is probably not a good plan.
You didn’t give me many details about your cycle. From what you did say, it seems that you had two embryos (fertilized eggs are called embryos) transferred to your uterus at the eight (?) cell stage (that would be very good if the embryos were transferred on the third day after the egg retrieval. Perfect embryo development on day three is eight cells). The embryos were graded as grade B (?) at that point. We (at Reproductive Biology Associates in Atlanta) grade our embryos on a scale of A to D on day three. (I’m assuming that the IVF center you used uses a similar grading system although these grading systems do vary from laboratory to laboratory.)
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