Thursday, September 22, 2005

IVF on the NHS ?

Just back from the hospital. It was good to talk to the consultant and I was quite satisfied with his review of the events of June.


  • Mrs T was definitely pregnant.
  • Mrs T was bleeding and in pain.
  • The sonographer (a senior sonographer) couldn't see an embryo.

Given these facts, the only option was to assume an ectopic pregnancy and investigate accordingly. When you look at the records of women who have died following an ectopic pregnancy there's always been delays in treatment. He was satisfied that, given the circumstances, the laparoscopy was the only appropriate course of action.

And then he surprised us.

His main aim of our meeting was to consider the question, "where do we go from here?". We've demonstrated that we can get pregnant unassisted, and we could of course continue trying to conceive naturally - which was in our minds exactly what we'd planned. After all, if you've read the earlier entries in this blog you'll remember that we did have a couple of cycles of fertility treatment (Intra Uterine Insemination - IUI) and that we felt uncomfortable with the amount of medical intervention so withdrew from it. However, he recommended that we move on to IVF - "now that you can get funding for it on the NHS". You certainly couldn't in our area when we were first seeing him.

We'd not thought about IVF at all since withdrawing from IUI, but he persuaded us to let him write the letter of referral to our nearest NHS IVF clinic, which serves as an application for funding. It won't come through for a few months, and even then we could put on hold if we're still uncomfortable with it, but it does get us in the system, gives us time to talk, think and pray about it, and - if we go for it - will save us about £5,500. (Of course, we weren't actually planning to spend that anyway, so it's a slightly misleading factor.)

In the meantime, we'll still try to get pregnant. Then we won't have to decide about IVF.

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