William Schoolcraft - If at First You Dont Conceive: A Complete Guide to Infertility from One of the Nations Leading Clinics

M Y P ATIENT T AYLOR was dedicated to her corporate career, but she always planned to have children someday. She never considered that there might be a problem. She never thought about if because her focus was always on when.

Yet when Taylor and her husband, Jared, decided that the time was right to start a family, they were unable to conceive. Taylor saw her infertility as a threat to the life she had envisioned. She fell into a depression that lasted more than 2 months.

For the first time in a life of considerable achievement, she felt defeated and out of control. She isolated herself from her friends and family, refusing to do anything but dwell on her thwarted desire to have a child.

Then, slowly, she pulled herself out of her despondency. Her intelligence and competitive nature came to the fore. Taylor resolved to fight for her fertility just as she fought for everything else shed wanted.

As Taylor and millions of other women and men have discovered, the fertility challenge can be a bewildering, frustrating, and financially crippling experience. Too often, infertility patients give themselves over to physicians and treatment programs without understanding the science, the medicine, the odds or the economics. The fact is that at our clinic, we can help nearly 75 percent of the women who come to us become pregnant using quite traditional fertility treatments. And if a patient is willing to consider in vitro fertilization (IVF), egg donors, sperm donors, or surrogate mothers, the rate of conception moves much closer to 100 percent.

So there is hope, but men and women fighting infertility need to arm themselves with the latest medical science as well as commonsense practices to improve their chances. They need to become their own best advocates in their efforts to start a family.

Taylor discovered this when her initial series of treatments failed. After spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for treatments that did not result in pregnancy, she became determined to educate herself about infertility treatmentsthe science, the economics, and the best practitioners in the nation.

Taylor spent months immersed in research. Then she found her way to my clinic. In our initial discussions, Taylors frustration and anger were obvious, but so was her determination. Still, she balked when I explained that I wanted to do an extensive series of initial tests, because shed already gone through similar tests.

We insist on doing our own tests with each patient because too often weve found that we cannot rely on what has been done by other physicians and clinics. This proved true also in Taylors case. We found that the shells around her eggs were much thicker than is normal, so the embryo could not break free and attach to the uterine lining.

Fortunately, we had worked with pioneering embryologist Jacques Cohen, PhD, whom one journalist described as the IVF lab god. Dr. Cohen pioneered micromanipulation techniques for operating on eggs, sperm, and embryos. His work led to the development of assisted hatching, which promotes pregnancy by initiating the hatching process following fertilization.

Dr. Cohen observed that embryos with a thin shell had a higher rate of implantation during IVF. He deduced that making a tiny hole in the shell might help the embryo hatch and give it a better chance to implant in the uterus.

Assisted hatching, which has become a routine procedure, has been a boon for those whom other assisted reproductive procedures have failed, and also for older women. It also worked beautifully for Taylor. We took her through her fifth IVF cycle and she became pregnantwith twins.

More than 7.3 million women and their partners in the United States are unable to have children because of infertility challenges, according to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine. That figure represents nearly 12 percent of the nations reproductive-age population.

There are many excellent clinics across the United States where you can seek top-notch treatment from fertility specialists. This book is based on the experiences and knowledge of our staff at the Colorado Center for Reproductive Medicine. Our clinic has consistently achieved annual birth rates that are among the highest in the United States, according to figures published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. It also was named as the nations number one fertility clinic in a survey and data analysis published by Child magazine in 2005.

As astounding as it may seem, our clinic is responsible for the successful births of nearly 30,000 children over the past 20 yearsmost of them born to men and women who had been told that they might never experience the joys of parenthood. Because of our consistently high success rates, patients from more than 40 countries, facing every fertility challenge imaginable, come to our facility in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. They come from a diverse mix of cultures, backgrounds, and professions.

Yet all too often they come to us burdened not only by infertility but also by inaccurate diagnoses, inadequate treatment, and a lack of the scientifically sound information they need to make intelligent and important decisions.

Women and men faced with infertility are hungry for up-to-date information and medically sound guidance. Their psychological stress has been shown to equal that of chronic pain victims, or those who are diagnosed with cancer or AIDS. The dropout rate for patients undergoing infertility treatment is well over 50 percent.