Improve IVF success – Fertility Doctor Shares Top Tips for IVF Success and Pregnancy

Improve IVF success – Fertility Doctor Shares Top Tips for IVF Success and Pregnancy

Transcription :

If you’re trying to get pregnant naturally or going to do IVF, the quality of your eggs is extremely important, and that’s what this video is all about. I’m going to share a real case study of a member of My Hope program. She worked hard to improve her fertility and was able to improve her egg quality for her upcoming IVF. Let me read her testimonial first to you, and then I’ll share a little bit of her personalized plan that I created for her so you can be inspired and get ideas of what you could be doing right now to improve your fertility, your egg quality, and get pregnant. All right, so I’m going to read her testimonial right now.

She starts off by saying, “Fertility win,” which is often what we do in the Hope program when we’re sharing our successes. “I’m utterly blown away and feeling so incredibly thankful for this program right now. It’s been so far a two-plus-year journey of various care providers telling me that I’m too old, my egg quality sucks. Here are the statistics: my miscarriages are probably due to poor egg quality. But hey, keep trying, and maybe you’ll get lucky. Well, I’m not the type of person to rely on luck alone. After getting my plan and working really hard, my husband and I felt it was the right time to move forward with IVF. We just had egg retrieval last week, and out of the nine mature eggs that they retrieved, seven have made it to a 5-day blast, which is amazing. She didn’t say that, I’m saying that. We’re sending them away for PGTA testing, but we’re absolutely over the moon with the results so far. After reading about typical IVF attrition rates, I was only hoping to have two or maybe three. After implementing the plan and putting in months of hard work, my old crappy eggs, in her words, seem to be absolutely sparkling now. If these results are any indication, I’m so thankful for the entire Hope program team and your supportive care throughout this journey. We’re excited to see what the next leg brings.”

That is amazing. That’s hard work, that’s what a proper plan, that’s what can be achieved. And now I want to break down for you what we did to get her to this point. All right, so let’s break it down a little bit.

The first, most important thing (and you probably heard about it in her testimonial, in the win that she shared) is that she did have a history of miscarriages. So she had recurrent pregnancy loss, and this is actually how it looked in December of 20120. She was pregnant, but at 10 weeks, she had a miscarriage because of chromosomal abnormalities. She wanted to avoid a D&C, so she took medication. It wasn’t clear, and she actually eventually had to have a D&C. So that complicates things.

In 21, she got pregnant, and it was a chemical, and then she also had another pregnancy shortly thereafter, and that wasn’t healthy, and she had to have another D&C. So she had multiple miscarriages and multiple D&Cs. When we see multiple D&Cs, we also have to make sure that the endometrium, the uterine lining, and the uterine environment are supported properly and get the proper nourishment and nutrients that they need so that they can function well not only for implantation but for holding a pregnancy and having enough of a thick lining as well.

One thing that I always like to clear up is, did she have a regular cycle or not? She did. She had a regular menstrual cycle, which was great. But when we ran her lab work, what we found out was that her thyroid antibodies were elevated, and she had a methylation issue. She was positive for the MTHFR Gene, which causes her to not metabolize and absorb folic acid or folate properly. And so we had to manage that as well. That also causes more inflammation, can be a clotting issue, and can cause a miscarriage. So we had to account for that. We also learned through blood work that egg quality was an issue, and so we needed to support her egg quality. She wanted to lose some additional weight that she had gained over these pregnancies, which also complicates the uterine environment.

Issue is she had scar tissue, tissue because she had a septum, and they had removed the septum. And so as a result, there was scar tissue that we need to account for so that the back of the uterus needs to look rounded, and hers was shaped with a dip to some varying degree, and that needed to be removed, and that’s what that septum was. She also had elevated testosterone levels, which could be associated with PCOS, but either way, that needed to be handled. So those were the main things that we found in our evaluation. So now that we know that that’s there, now we have to handle that right now, we have to address those things, we have to support what we see. 

So, the first thing that we always look at is diet, and anytime somebody has an autoimmune issue, then we need to account for that, and we need to put them on an immune-supporting diet, to reduce inflammation. We have to clear out some of the things that their immune system is sensitive to. Additionally, we start looking at lifestyle factors.

So, I wanted to make sure she was exercising regularly but mildly, that she was getting enough sleep. Those two things were really, really important when we have autoimmune issues. And then some home therapies that I asked her to do were castor oil packs, which are useful for allowing the endometrium to heal and start to recover, bring more nourishment, and bring more circulation. I did ask her to do some vaginal steaming as well, not often but once a cycle, and then some moxibustion as well to improve circulation, improve the health of the blood flowing to the pelvic area. So, those were really important things.

Additionally, in her plan (and I just keep looking out ’cause I’m looking at her plan), she needed to work with the right clinic for IVF. So, she knew that she wanted to go down that road. And one of the things that we did within the program and do for all of our members who are going or want to go or need to go through IVF is help them choose the right clinic that’s best for them. And so, this is absolutely something that we did for her. She was narrowing it down between a couple of clinics, and we helped her pick the right one that we thought was best for her in this situation because that’s going to make a huge difference not just in choosing the right doctor and clinic but also the right embryology lab to get her the results because it’s not just about picking out those eggs, it’s about fertilization, it’s about watching those embryos grow and so forth. So, we need to make sure that that is important.

And then we put her on a Supplement Plan as well. Nutritional supplements, nutraceuticals are essential for progress, especially when we’re dealing with the areas that we’re dealing with her. So, we needed to support her immune system, which was really important, and we needed to increase some blood circulation and make sure that the lining was being supported properly. So, we put her on some proteolytic enzymes, we made sure she was on a methylated B complex for her MTHFR Gene, we put her on some vitamin to lower her testosterone levels and to balance her hormones.

Then we need to let that have some time, so that we need some time to work and take hold. After she was done with about 3 months in that fourth month of her plan, we retested her labs. And then as a result of those results, we made modifications to her plan. So, some of the things that we saw that were happening was that we were seeing improvements, so we could lower some dosages of some of the things she was taking. We couldn’t take everything out, but we could modify some things because they were working. And for some of the things that she had, they were genetic issues and also long-term substantial issues that needed ongoing support. So, we could modify some dosages and we could adjust her supplements to accommodate for the results that we were seeing.

But she was seeing some really good progress. But the thing that we needed to address now was a little bit more on the adrenal support, the stress support because of everything she was going through. So, we were able to do that as well and swap some supplements for her. And she did beautifully with all of that. So much so then we saw the results that we saw with her testimonial where she was able to go through an IVF cycle. And I should say she actually went through one earlier before she did the plan, and the results were nowhere near this. She didn’t even have any embryos left, and now she did, and it was a dramatic improvement in terms of what she was expecting, right? You heard her say she was expecting two to three embryos for testing, and she got much more than that. And in addition, which didn’t show up in her testimonial because we didn’t have those results back yet, she had multiple normal healthy embryos to use for transfer. And that is the key. It’s not just about getting a fair amount of embryos to send for testing, although that’s the first step, then we want that next part for those to come back which shows that everything that she did on the egg quality supporting side was fruitful and yielded the results that we were expecting. In addition to that, the pieces that are going to be important for her upcoming transfer.

So now her protocol will be adjusted again to prepare for transfer because now we don’t need to work on egg quality. Now we’re just working to make sure that the endometrium is healthy, that her immune system is functioning properly, that blood clotting is not going to happen so that when she has a transfer, she has implantation and yields a healthy pregnancy.

These tips are just the tip of the iceberg, as you can see. It takes a lot of management and adjustment and progress depending on what she’s doing and customization based on her individual needs because there is no one-size-fits-all. As always, working with a fertility coach that can identify what you need is crucial when you want to see these results. If you’re ready to get pregnant and want to have me as your fertility coach, head on over to marks.com Discovery call to speak with a real human, a real person on my team so we can identify if having me as your fertility coach is the right next step for you on your fertility journey.

If you like this video, give me a thumbs up. And in addition, I want to hear from you. I want to know what you like about this video? What did you like about this story of hope that resonates with you? Comment below and let me know. If you’re not already a subscriber to my YouTube channel, you need to be. So hit that Bell to subscribe and get notified when I put out another video for all of you to keep getting inspired. Here are a few more hope stories, real case studies of women and couples that we have supported in the Hope program. If it was possible for them, it can absolutely be possible for you. So check those out right here, and until the next video, stay fertile.