Dealing With Loss After Infertility Treatment

My name is Stacy Bjorkman, and I am on AGC Scholarship Foundation’s Board of Directors. You may have read a little about my story in the “About AGC” tab on the website, but I’d like to share a bit more with you.

My now ex-husband, Jason, and I struggled with infertility for about 5 years. We conceived naturally the first time, but I miscarried our little girl at about 17 weeks when my water broke in the middle of the night. After that, there was radio silence in my uterus. So we got on the fertility train: the tracks with lots of twists and turns, but no stops, no final destination. After four medicated IUIs and four IVFs (two of which ended in miscarriage of twins), we were finally blessed with our son, Henry. With the help of both a reproductive endocrinologist and a reproductive immunologist, Henry arrived in our arms after a treacherous 36 weeks of fear, endless morning sickness, and lots and lots of drugs – but he was here – a REAL LIVE baby!

Infertility was a topic of discussion at the world’s largest women’s health and rights conference just held in Copenhagen by Women Deliver. While reproductive health issues such as maternal health and infant mortality are often the focus among global health topics, infertility is often not.

This year’s conference attracted worldwide interest with more than 5,500 conference participants drawn from government ministers, policy makers, business leaders, non-government organizations (NGOs), activists, celebrities and royalty to focus on how to improve the lives of girls and women by 2030. Issues discussed included child marriage, maternal mortality, and violence against women.

Pathways to Parenthood

When I was 18 years old, during the weekend of my college orientation, I was rushed to the hospital with severe cramping and bleeding.  Following emergency exploratory surgery, I learned that I had severe endometriosis, a condition that would make it very difficult for me to conceive children.  I was young and unmarried; at the time, I didn’t want to be married. While this news disappointed me, I didn’t appreciate the magnitude of that diagnosis then.

This week marks National Infertility Awareness Week (NIAW). If you don’t know about it, that’s ok, but consider this your official alert and opportunity to think about the people in your life — family, friends, neighbors — who might be struggling with infertility every single day. Chances are you know someone as more than seven million people or one in every eight couples in the US of childbearing age experience infertility.

ARC Fertility Encourages Patients to
#StartAsking for NIAW

ARC Fertility is proud to announce that it has partnered with Resolve as an official sponsor of National Infertility Awareness Week (April 24-30, 2016). It is estimated that 1 in 8 couples struggle with infertility, yet awareness remains low. This year’s theme is #StartAsking. We are encouraging those touched by infertility to become advocates for themselves and for the infertility community. They can do this when they #StartAsking for support from their employers, legislators, families and beyond. There is a NIAW toolkit with wealth of information and ideas to help facilitate.

Relieving Nightmares with Daydreams

Coping with Infertility

Infertility. The experience is a bad dream that couples may not wake up from for many months or even years. When it becomes clear that pregnancy is elusive, life as it has been known becomes unrecognizable.

In a sad development for the patient, the medical team at the Cleveland Clinic and prospective parents, comes news the first uterine transplant performed in the US has failed. The complex, eight-hour surgery took place on February 24 and the patient — Janice, 26 — was initially in stable condition. She was healthy enough just a few days later to briefly appear at the hospital’s press conference to announce the groundbreaking surgery. The failure occurred the next day although a biopsy performed earlier had shown no signs of rejection.

In a development that may someday help men facing infertility, Chinese scientists have just announced they were able to create sperm in a lab petri dish using embryonic stem cells from mice. The sperm was used to fertilize mouse eggs using in vitro fertilization (IVF), creating healthy babies that went on to have their own offspring. That’s promising. 

There’s exciting medical news this week for women who want to give birth but don’t have a uterus — needed to become pregnant and give birth — because it was removed due to illness or they were born without one. According to estimates, approximately 50,000 American women may be candidates for the uterine transplant just performed in the U.S. 

Today, any couple facing problems in getting and staying pregnant benefits from ongoing medical advances that result in new techniques to diagnose and treat infertility. Among those are tests of sperm and embryos that may better predict and therefore improve outcomes such as sperm DNA integrity testing.

Better understanding of the earliest stages of human development and the opportunity to improve fertility treatment and prevent miscarriages are goals of the British researcher who just received permission from United Kingdom (U.K.) regulators to use a powerful new genome editing technique on human embryos in the lab.

Medical advances — such as genetic testing applied to reproductive medicine — offer helpful new techniques designed to improve your chances of having a healthy baby.

Fertility specialists have long noticed a relationship between thyroid disorders and reproductive health issues including irregular periods, difficulty getting pregnant, and multiple miscarriages early in pregnancy. During Thyroid Awareness Month and with new research, it’s worth knowing about a not uncommon and treatable problem that may be affecting your plans for a new family.

The topic of infertility is often in the news – from celebrities sharing their personal struggles to the latest medical treatments available to help you have a baby.

Most recently, Chrissy Teigen and Tyra Banks discussed their own painful experience on their show FABLife. For Teigen, married to musician John Legend, constantly being asked why she doesn’t have children has been intrusive. Still, she noted that the minute you open up about having problems getting pregnant, you find out how many other people are also seeing fertility specialists. With the recent news of her pregnancy, she has a happy outcome and lots to talk about.

Read more on Dr. Adamson’s blog on the Huffington Post.

Imagine receiving a cancer diagnosis when you’re trying to get pregnant or are considering pregnancy in the future. Fortunately, with advances in treating cancer and options to preserve fertility, cancer survivors may still be able to start or add to their family.

While you’ll want to focus on treatment for your condition, if your plans include having children, you’ll also want to understand the impact on your fertility and consider options to help improve your chances of getting pregnant later – before starting cancer treatment. That doesn’t always happen and health professionals recognize they can do better.

Read more on Dr. Adamson’s blog on the Huffington Post

The news these days is full of things to do — and not do — if you want to increase your chances of getting and staying pregnant. Add another item to the list, according to a small study presented at a Rome medical conference in June — taking common anti-inflammatory pain relievers.

According to researchers, the study of 39 women confirmed a relationship between taking certain pain relievers — non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) containing Ibuprofen or Naproxen and a disruption in the menstrual cycle which may interfere with ovulation. Over-the-counter (OTC) medication containing these ingredients include Aleve, Motrin and Advil.

Read more on Dr. Adamson’s blog at Huffington Post