Touched by the Stork - Fertility Information

Sue Lueschow is an RN fertility specialist who absolutely loves her job. This came as something of a surprise to her since she initially fought against entering the field. Although she always wanted to work in gynecology and obstetrics, she avoided the fertility specialty because of the hours that are required. After all, fertilization doesn’t work on a 9-5 schedule so fertility specialists have to be willing to be available to their patients at all hours of the day and night. After Lueschow fell into the work, she found that the hours didn’t make a dent in her love for the field.

Lueschow’s job involves a number of different duties. She is the person that you will talk to when you are first learning about how fertilization works and what procedures you are going to follow to try to get pregnant. She also works on the physical side of things by retrieving eggs and transferring embryos to make the actual fertilization process take place. But a large part of what Lueschow does as a fertility nurse is just be there for her patients. The process of in vitro fertilization is one which has many highs and lows. There’s excitement and anxiety if you find out that the fertilization was successful and there can be devastating depression when it’s unsuccessful.

Having a nurse there who is knowledgeable about the fertilization process and who will take the time to make it go smoothly for you is critical to how well the procedure will go. With nurses like Lueschow in the fertility field, hopeful parents can rest easy knowing that their needs are going to be taken care of during a time of their lives that can otherwise be harrowing. You can learn more about Sue Lueschow (and get information about what your fertility nurse may help you with) from her recent profile at the Green Bay Press Gazette.

Photo from Stitches in Faith.

The boundaries of the globe are getting increasingly easier to cross in all ways due to globalization and finding an egg donor is no exception to the trend. There are plenty of places in America where hopeful couples can look for an egg donor but many are taking their search outside of the United States to other destinations. Reasons for the increase in so-called “reproductive travelers” include a broader range of donors to choose from, lower costs for the egg donation and an overall quicker experience.

AFP takes a look at the increase in such reproductive travelers heading to India to find their egg donors. They showcase the work happening at Malpani Clinic in Mumbai where the entire procedure costs less than $6000 USD. This low cost probably plays a large role in the increased interested in traveling overseas for the procedure. A doctor at a nearby clinic stated that the number of foreigners that she’s seen coming over for egg donation has doubled in just the last year.

Of course, there are risks associated with going overseas to get your egg donation. You should make sure that you look into the background of the clinic and the doctors who work there. After all, almost anyone can set up a website and you don’t want to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars in travel to get to a place that you don’t want to do your procedure. Would you go to these literal lengths to get your egg donation done elsewhere?

Women in the southeastern United States who have been consider tubal reversal surgery will probably be happy to know that a new procedure being done in Florida is faster and less painful than the traditional tubal reversal surgery. The new surgery is robot-assisted which means that doctors insert robots through small incisions to assist with the tubal reversal. This results in less incisions to the body meaning that the whole process goes more quickly and that the recovery time is considerably faster. In fact, the new tubal reversal surgery makes it possible for the procedure to be a single-day outpatient procedure and patients are able to return to normal daily activities within a few days of the reversal. This is considerably faster than the traditional tubal reversal which can take weeks of bed time for recovery.

Learn more about the Florida hospital from the Orlando Business Journal. Learn more about the procedure from Intuitive Surgical.

Women in Canada who are looking into in vitro fertilization may find that they have a cheaper, safer option than IVF in upcoming years. There’s no telling yet whether the procedure, known as in vitro maturation oocyte vitrification or IVM OV, will take off or whether or not it will eventually be available in the states but it’s an important step in the right direction for improving fertility treatments.

The main difference between IVM OV and IVF is that it doesn’t include the hormonal treatments that can cause so many problems for women during the in vitro fertilization process. The hormones of traditional IVF have a number of negative side effects including nausea, mood swings, bloating and weight gain. There are also risks of greater side effects including ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome and increased cancer risk. Instead of using the hormone injections, IVM OV combines in vitro maturation (in which eggs are matured in a lab) with oocyte vitrification (the freezing of the mature eggs) for the fertilization.

In addition to reducing the risks associated with hormone injections, it is believed that IVM OV will be a less expensive procedure if it begins to be used widely. There are drawbacks to this kind of fertilization which include that it only works for about a third of women (those with enough ovarian follicles) and that results are currently better with IVF than with IVM OV. But it presents an additional option to women interested in fertilization choices.

Learn more from Canada.com.

Remember all of those stories back in the 1980’s and 1990’s about women on fertility drugs who ended up having quintuplets, sextuplets and more? You may have noticed a decline in the news announcements about these kind of births. If so, you might have chalked it up to the fact that it’s not headline-making news anymore. But the real reason that you haven’t heard about these births is that the incidence of them is going down considerably.

The Courier-Journal from Louisville, KY cites a number of statistics which show that higher-order multiple births are on the decline in Kentucky as well as throughout the nation. They say that this is due in large part to the changes made in the IVF industry which are intended to protect mothers. Multiple-births of this nature pose significant health risks to moms (not to mention the potential mental health risks of suddenly having seven babies in your formerly childless home!) So the new rules followed by doctors performing IVF reduce the risk of multiple births to avoid these problems.