What is the difference between IVF and ICSI?

The IVF success rate depends on the age of the woman and the cause of infertility. The success rate reaches 70% for every embryo transfer attempt in women younger than 35 years. In vitro fertilization leads to a live-birth in 90% of cases if the couple does not give up.

All recent studies show that a woman can get back to her normal life directly after transfer. She can climb stairs, kneel to catch things from the floor, drive for a long distance, take a shower, sleep in any position, catch a flight…

This is the question that no IVF specialist can answer. If we knew the cause that will lead to failure, we would have solved it before transferring the embryos. We can only make assumptions about the causes. Embryo implantation in the uterus is a very complex process and multiple factors are involved. We can monitor and control all the factors we know about, like endometrial thickness, the timing of transfer and the absence of uterine problems. Other factors like immunity are known to play a role but cannot be controlled. The majority of factors remain unknown. Whether we like it or not, we always do our best but the final outcome is in God’s hands.

IVF is a multiple step procedure. The first step, ovarian stimulation, consists in daily hormonal injections for a period that varies between 8 and 12 days. Of course injections are burdensome, but some people require taking injections daily all their life so few days of injections are not a huge deal. The second step is oocyte pick up. It is performed under sedation and it is a painless procedure. The pain after the procedure is similar to regular period pain. The last step is embryo transfer, that takes less than a minute and that does not require any sedation as it is similar to any gynecological check up.

The urine pregnancy test cannot detect pregnancy very early. The pregnancy hormone, bhcg, appears in the blood before it appears in the urine. Blood test needs at least 12 days post-transfer to detect pregnancy. So there is no point in doing a home pregnancy test before that.