A PGD dream

I had a dream about PGD or rather IVF. After all although the PGD part is the key, the most important, the whole reason for doing IVF from the patients point of view it is only a phonecall about how many embryos are unaffected.

So I had an IVF dream. It was quite scary really, like dreaming about school or exams.In my dream I had a conversation with my consultant.

My consultant is a lovely person. he is very energetic and optimistic. He really wants couples to get pregnant it is not just a job for him it is also a passion, a very rewarding experience in case of success. He is relatively flexible and full of new ideas. He really does want the best outcome.

Sadly I don't think he sees me as an individual. I mean he does when he talks to me but not when he "works on me". I am just a body then. I piece of material for his next experiment. He wants his experiment to be successful and he uses all the best equipment and best added ingredients. However he does not take me into account. He follows the clinics general protocol very strictly and trusts their drugs far more than a woman's body. Well, he should beleive in what he is doing, he should beleive in his own clinics protocol but I wish he would take me more into account.

In my dream we reached a satisfactory conclusion for both parties. We agreed that he will firstly use my own egg and only than the stimulated eggs. Sadly such thing is only possible in a dream. As in reality things work a bit different. My explanation will not be at all scientific and might even be wrong in parts but that is what I understood.


A women has many-many follicles with hopefully eggs in them to start with. Some might be empty and some might have two eggs but the majority have one egg inside. They are "sleeping" in her body. Each month around 20 follicles wake up. Due to the hormones produced by a female body  each month one of those 20 follicles will mature and the rest will just be discarded. That is the normal cycle. In a stimulated IVF cycle due to much more hormones than normally the rest of those 20 (or whatever number) follicles might mature as well.  So there is no telling which one would have matured had there been no stimulation. It sounds fantastic doesn't it? After all 20 follicles must give a lot more chance than 1.

Well, not necessarily. It is not as easy as that. Our ovaries are designed to nurture 1 follicle every second month (as there are two ovaries working alternately) not 20! Therefore the environment is far from ideal. A bit too crowded with difficulties in getting space and nutrients. In fact one might end up having 20 crap eggs instead of 1 perfect. And that is what happened to me on our second PGD-IVF cycle. Except that I had not 20 but more than 30 crap eggs. It wasn't comfortable either. That's why I am contemplating trying natural IVF where there is no stimulation involved, the doctors just retrieve the one egg grown by the woman's own hormones.