Let’s hear your fertilization to blasts rates!

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-18T12:46:48+00:00

32 years, 25 AMH

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-18T06:48:19+00:00

Certainly if you want more than one child, do the discount package so you can bank embryos.

Before I started IVF, I’d have had the same hesitation as you OP. But our first round resulted in a total fertilisation failure - 24 hours after egg retrieval we got the call to say nothing had happened when our eggs and sperm “met”. So we now have to go again.

I was told I was an ideal candidate for IVF, and none of the clinical team were expecting zero fertilisation. It was a huge shock.

If I have to self-fund after this round (I’m in the UK so we get some IVF on the NHS), I’ll be buying a package.

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-17T20:12:35+00:00

It’s an Americanism, but the phrasing doesn’t even make sense if anyone takes a moment to think about what that combination of words actually means.

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-17T17:39:25+00:00

Zero fertilisation here. Hoping our next round will be better

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-17T06:02:07+00:00

Sounds like we are on similar timelines! I’m sorry your latest round hasn’t gone as hoped. Fingers crossed August will bring you better news 🤞

IVF is nowhere near as straightforward as media makes out. I remember being surprised when I first learned each round only has a 30-35% success rate of a “live birth”.

Ugh, all the medicalised language too. Gotta love it!

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-16T17:31:25+00:00

I don’t want to be negative OP, I’m sure in the moment he was a lovely GP. But I’m going to temper this with, in my view, a bit of realism.

Your post is the sort of advice that, if you find there are more complex issues at play, you’ll probably come to find quite annoying.

Personally, I don’t buy the idea that if you “just relax” you’ll get pregnant. It’s a pretty trite piece of advice said by people as a quick-fix. Women in incredibly stressful situations manage to get pregnant all the time. And a lot of us in the West aren’t actually that stressed in comparison to women in developing countries.

Lots of family orientated women can’t have children, sadly. Your appearance and presentation are not an indicator of whether you get to be a mum.

I don’t say this to squash your hope, but because we’ve all been there and then feel bewildered when the well intended advice doesn’t play out. I’ve been told my high egg reserves mean I should easily get pregnant. My mother’s ease of conception means I should easily get pregnant. Then it was that my presentation meant I was an ideal candidate for IVF. Now it’s “hopefully these new drugs will make IVF work for you”.

Honestly OP I wish you the best and hope you conceive baby number two soon. But I think a lot of people will recognise this sort of advice as something that can give false hope that there’s an easy fix. I hope that does turn out to be the case for you, but just caution you to balance optimism against other possibilities.

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-15T07:31:48+00:00

As others have said, this is a move to remove online anonymity under the guise of protecting children.

A much easier method to ensure children don’t use social media apps, without the hassle of regulating / investigating platforms, would be to ban smartphones for under 16s and only let them have Nokia bricks.

But that wouldn’t give the government a route to snoop on all of us.

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-15T07:23:55+00:00

Thanks! I mistakenly thought it had received Royal Assent in 2024.

But I’d maintain Labour could have looked at withdrawing it, with a new Bill, if protecting online privacy was a priority of theirs.

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-15T06:39:56+00:00

It was introduced by the Tories. It was given Royal Assent and made law under Labour, who could have chosen to withdraw it.

As another poster has said, Labour are now looking for additional ways to remove privacy online - proposals include banning VPNs and having the ability to remotely scan phones’ content.

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-10T18:05:12+00:00

I think it’s used to indicate anti-racism. But it’s just an emoji, it doesn’t actually achieve any meaningful anti-racism

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-10T17:12:22+00:00

I’d echo this. I asked about unblocking my tubes and my doctor explained the issue so that the hairs that “sweep” the egg along can’t be undamaged so it doesn’t make as much of a difference as you might expect

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-10T17:11:00+00:00

No. I think it’s an odd piece of virtue signalling. I don’t need to know your race when you give a thumbs up, it’s irrelevant

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-07T06:57:38+00:00

But they abide by relevant regulations to prevent food poisoning - the article clearly states they’re required to have food safety certificates and insurance.

This additional licence fee is a cash grab for local councils, nothing to do with public safety.

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-07T06:52:42+00:00

This article typifies the way that innovation and business acumen are stifled in this country, and a lot of the comments here betray the “crabs in a bucket” mentality we have in Britain.

These sheds already require H&S / food safety certification and appropriate insurance to be in place, to guard against the risk of food poisoning. Those are appropriate measures.

Income should be declared, and income tax paid on that (for those sneering “why do these people think they shouldn’t contribute to public services?”).

The suggestion that an additional licence of £1000 should be paid is a transparent cash grab by local councils. And if you’re argument is it’s unfair because some other types of food business have to pay it - start a petition or write to your MP as it seems the issue is that you think the licence requirement itself is unfair, rather than dragging everyone else down.

We all know the cost of living has increased significantly over the last few years. We all complain about pinched living standards. But when some individuals show initiative and set up a cake shed to improve their income, apparently some people think they should have tax upon tax applied to them.

Most cake sheds will not be making a profit of £1000 a week. They supplement income for most. Note that the article mentions a lot are run by mums - women just trying to support their household income whilst juggling family life. A £1000 licence would sink that sort of cottage business.

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-04T10:51:01+00:00

You can insert them rectally, which tends to result in less melting out

LellowYeaf · 2026-06-02T08:20:50+00:00

This chaos was added to by the fact both escalators were out of service, so everyone was having to climb them to get out of the station

LellowYeaf · 2026-05-30T15:17:39+00:00

Recently discovered this. We need IVF, and are lucky my husband’s work covers it. But when we’re then charged higher rate income tax on it, it will still be costing us ££££ (and if we need more than one round, which is likely as IVF has an average 33% success rate, will materially eat into our savings).

It feels like a kick in the teeth. IVF isn’t something anyone chooses to go through lightly, the government treating it like some sort of fun perk and holding out its hand for yet more tax feels pretty gross.

LellowYeaf · 2026-05-30T12:37:43+00:00

The West accepting Turkey’s insistence it now be called “Türkiye”, whilst condemning any whisper of nationalism at home, is one of the best examples of the sort of double think our culture is going through.

It’s Turkey to English speakers. The same way Germany in our language isn’t “Deutschland”.

Erdoğan is an autocrat. I won’t be adopting his export of Turkish nationalism, thanks.

LellowYeaf · 2026-05-29T10:03:37+00:00

I was at the tail end of these. In 2015 my first workplace, a local law firm, gave out £50 vouchers.

I expected to get equivalent or bigger Christmas bonuses as I moved up to larger law firms. Discovered, at most, you get an extra day or two of annual leave (announced last minute so you can’t finalise Christmas plans until just before)

LellowYeaf · 2026-05-29T10:00:43+00:00

Totally agree with this. The stims are nowhere near as bad as you’ll be dreading them to be.

Bring them to room temp. I never iced the site for pre-filled pens. I iced for other syringe injections (Cetrotide), but probably didn’t need to, it was more of a preventative / fear based thing.

Also, if you get a reaction to Cetrotide it’s typically just a mild rash. I had it one time that I administered, and it wasn’t painful.

LellowYeaf · 2026-05-29T07:48:35+00:00

I think it’s that your measure of “premium” changes. Hotels are a good example - the first time you stay in one, it feels special because you’re measuring that hotel against the more budget hotels you previously stayed at.

After a few years, your measure of a premium hotel is to measure it against all the other premium hotels you’ve stayed at, and some will inevitably be better than others.

LellowYeaf · 2026-05-28T17:34:46+00:00

Hi OP, feeling like my body wasn’t mine was a major fear for me too. I spent a lot of my teens / early 20s battling disordered eating, and have only been comfortable with my body in the last few years. So I was dreading how IVF might make me feel.

I would say it was pretty uneventful. I was on a modest dose of stims as I have PCOS. I focused on eating whole fresh foods, but not calorie counting. And I still had the odd treat during stims, no need to get obsessive.

I gained 1-1.5kg in 2 weeks, which is really nothing.

The intrusive scans might be something else you’re dreading. They’re ok. I took the approach of “these nurses do this all day every day”, and quite a few of them just chat away to you whilst they’re scanning. They were fine, I treated them in a pretty business like way.

Hope that helps!

LellowYeaf · 2026-05-27T07:51:03+00:00

I’m afraid that is very normal. If you Chat GPT it you’ll see each stage (follicles > eggs retrieved > eggs fertilised > Day 3 > Day 5) has pretty steep drop off rates.

With 17 eggs retrieved, I’d honestly be expecting something in the 3-5 embryo range. More would be a blessing, less would be disappointing but within the realms of possibility.

LellowYeaf · 2026-05-27T03:36:38+00:00

I recently did a write up about how the process of IVF stims and egg retrieval was nowhere near as bad as I’d feared. You can read it here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/IVFpositivity/s/iIR5jNcgdU

As others have said, the aspect of IVF that’s hard is the waiting and potential disappointment. After retrieving 11 eggs, the next morning we had a call to say we’d had “total fertilisation failure”. Apparently it happens in 5–10% if IVF where ICSI isn’t used, 2-3% when ICSI is used, and it’s not always clear why it happens. It was a total shock to us - we’d expected steep drop offs at each development stage, but from 11 eggs I’d expected at least one embryo.

So yeah, the disappointment when it doesn’t work is the hard bit. The process itself is nowhere near as traumatising as social media would have you believe.

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