IVF "add-ons" & me
- Hannah Vaughan Jones
- Nov 17
- 4 min read
Yesterday's Sunday Times newspaper included an article written by my friend and fellow IVF-er, Gabby Griffith, with a picture of me looking stern and serious under the headline!
The piece followed on from a legal case brought by an IVF patient against her private fertility clinic, ARGC, when she suffered a stroke after treatment. Her case centres on the so-called "add-on" treatment she underwent at her clinic's suggestion. I was interviewed by Gabby because in my long journey to becoming a parent, I also underwent a LOT of additional treatment on top of the (already brutal) standard IVF (ICSI in our case... believe me the acronyms are unfathomable and kickstarted my lifelong hatred of abbreviated terms). Nevertheless, these add-ons included...
Endometrial scratches - which are as gross and as acutely painful as they sound;
Embryo glue - I believe it's supposed to do what it says on the tin and kind of stick the embryo to the uterine lining to help implantation;
Time-lapse embryo imaging - I'm still baffled as to why a process which can only serve to help an embryologist do her/his job should be an additional cost to a patient. I think one of the ways this was sold to me was that we might end up with embryonic photos of our child. In the end we did so many rounds and had so many cell cluster photos that I couldn't tell you if I tried which (if any) of the photos was actually of our son. So, hey, no framed photo for us!;
Embryo screening - for our last three or four rounds of treatment we did PGT testing (pre-implantation genetic testing) which essentially tells you if the embryo is genetically ok or not. If not, no point in transferring it, if yes, give it a whirl but you still have no increased chance of a healthy pregnancy or indeed the loaded term "live birth scenario".
Assisted hatching - again I don't know the ins and outs of this but it was something to do with assisting the hatching of the embryo into the lining of my womb. And again, I remain slightly baffled as to why anything that might help the process of getting me pregnant wouldn't automatically be included in every cycle of fertility treatment without me having to give the thumbs up and empty my bank account.
Intralipids - the last big add-on we tried was this form of immunotherapy. Something to do with flooding my system with a concoction to remove the NK cells (Natural Killer - nice right?) that might be attacking any foreign entity (in this case embryo) that enters my body. This was time-consuming, expensive and basically a fat drip of circa 3k calories in egg yolk emulsion that was intravenously plugged into me over a few hours.
My message in this article is that while some people might swear by a particular treatment for them, there is simply not enough research in this area (hello WOMEN'S HEALTH!!) and there is certainly no magic ingredient that currently works for all. So you end up feeling exploited and ashamed (of your body and your choices) when you're feeling at your most vulnerable.
The sums of money associated with are wild. I don't know exactly how much we spent on add-ons but it was easily in the thousands £££.
The truth is that none of the add-ons we tried made a jot of difference other than making us poorer, sadder, and me fatter.
The end of our fertility experience saw our wonderful consultant, Geoffrey Trew, remind us that we had two frozen embryos that we could try to transfer. Both had been PGT screened and the results had come back "inconclusive" (at what financial cost, I can't really bear to think about it - much ventured, nothing gained). The embryos were also really ugly... low grade, amongst the lowest we had ever produced. We had both embryos transferred into me during a natural cycle - no stims, no steroids, no fat drips, just a few cyclogest progesterone pessaries for my pleasure 😏. And guess what? One of those ugly embryos stuck and is now an incredibly beautiful nearly six year old boy!
The founders of IVF - as seen in the brilliant Netflix film "Joy" were motivated by women, by mothers and by equality. Everyone involved in the film - writers, producers, directors, actors - all had direct or indirect experience of IVF, which really hammered home to me the need to take things back to basics. We need more research, more studies, a patient-over-profit emphasis, and as ever, women need to start advocating for themselves. I get it, the guilt is overwhelming. I would have done everything (and in many ways, I really did try everything) to have my son. But it doesn't work for all people at all times and it feels grossly unfair for those folks already spinning the wheel of fortune to have to shoulder the burden of yet more unknowns.
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