After conceiving her first son so easily, Meghan and her husband never expected to struggle getting pregnant the second time around. She was still young and in her 20s, but she noticed that her menstrual cycle had changed. She was diagnosed with a luteal phase defect, which impacts the stage of the menstrual cycle after ovulation and before the period starts. In Meghan’s case, she was ovulating too late and there wasn’t enough time for the egg implant.
Meghan sought help from a fertility clinic in her home state of Florida where her doctor tried various treatments, such as intrauterine insemination (IUI) and fertility medications, but each attempt was unsuccessful. At that point, her doctor suggested in vitro fertilization (IVF), a process that combines sperm and eggs in the laboratory. She was overjoyed that they were able to retrieve 33 eggs. The encouraging news was soon replaced by disbelief. “We then found out that not a single egg fertilized.” The IVF cycle was a failure. The news was shocking, and she was completely disheartened when no one could give her an explanation of why this happened.
Instead of forging on the same path at the same clinic, she and her husband decided to seek help at a new fertility clinic where her doctor recommended moving forward with another round of IVF. This time, Meghan stimmed a little bit longer, but the process yielded the exact same results. “The doctor told us the issue was with my eggs,” Megan explained. She couldn’t believe what she heard.
After the devastating experience she had at the previous two fertility clinics, she and her husband decided to take a year off from trying and spent some time researching clinics to give them the best chance at achieving her dream of having a second child.
Meghan and her husband decided to try one last time – their “hail Mary” shot at CCRM, a fertility center 2,000 miles away in Denver, Colorado.
“Right away, Dr. William Schoolcraft believed my body might be sensitive to the synthetic hormones. He wanted to try a completely different approach.”
They decided to move forward with a fertility treatment called in vitro maturation (IVM), which retrieves the eggs when they are younger and are matured in the lab. In Meghan’s case, the only use of hormones was the trigger shot to initiate ovulation. The new treatment protocol worked! After a successful pregnancy, her second son arrived on May 8 – Mother’s Day!
“If we had gone someplace else, they would have tried the same approach over and over again. We are so grateful to Dr. Schoolcraft for really listening to our case and creating a treatment plan that was right for me.”
CCRM physicians are proud to partner with each individual patient to develop custom-tailored analyses and treatments to help ensure the best outcome possible.
Meghan and her husband were so happy with their experience at CCRM that they are returning to Colorado to have a third child.
