Me, to my consultant: What’s the most significant determinant of success for embryo transfer?
Her: What do you mean?
Me: Well obviously I eat healthily, I don’t smoke, I’m not drinking but is there anything else…
Her: It’s the quality of the embryo.
Me: I’m so glad you said that. I’ve been looking at all these stupid forums and reading about pineapple and acupuncture and…
Her: It’s the quality of the embryo. If you have one, two failed implantations then maybe we’ll look at the receptivity of the endometrium but at the moment that’s not necessary.
Now that is why I love and trust my consultant. Because I don’t even care if that’s true or not. Although for what it’s worth, I believe her. But really simply there and then she was telling me that if this doesn’t work, it’s not my fault. That basically, it’s in the hands of biology. That I can stand on my head, eat pineapples and Brazil nuts if it will make me feel better but that if that embryo doesn’t stick, it will be because the embryo wasn’t viable.
Egged On 
Well if it doesn’t sick, it could be there was something wrong with the embryo, or it could be some other issue like with the womb. Basically it is either the seed or the soil. For instance for some women the womb lining could be too thin, or they have endometriosis / elevated natural killer cells (one theory) / thyroid too high/low etc that could cause issues. There are still quite a lot of unknowns in the whole area unfortunately! You can have the perfect embryos transferred and it still might not work. Sorry, not to be too negative, just wanted to prepare you a bit. I agree that you don’t need to eat pineapple or brazil nuts or whatever though!
I’m aware of that, but my point remains that if it doesn’t work, it’s not because of anything I did or didn’t do. It’s hard for us, in a society that tells us we can do anything, to accept that some things are out of our control, but this is one of those things we can do nothing about. And I think women need to remember that.
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