A 47 year-old woman, how did she make a pair of boy and girl twins?

At the age of 47, would you still have courage to embrace a dream of having a child? More and more women missed their best time for pregnancy and don’t know what to do. Besides, how much time and money would cost with such an age?

Frankly, I won’t encourage people who are older than 43 to try IVF with their own eggs. The reason is low successful rate accompanied with plenty of cost and time. Using donated eggs would definitely be the first choice for them. However, the question is, “Could you accept it?”. If the answer is negative, what is your plan B? I usually ask my clients in dilemma, “Are you sure that you are determine to do this?”. Only if the answer is positive, I will agree to start this last journey before their last stop – oocyte recipient program.

To make a commitment to my clients, I’ll try calculating the estimated oocytes number need per baby for my younger clients. However, for clients over 40, I will precisely let them know how much oocytes they might need for 1-2 blastocysts with no chromosomal abnormality. In the meantime, I will ask them to set up a stop loss point, which is the spirit of PP-IVF (personalized-precision IVF).

C’est la vie! Who would know that a woman with such a beauty would only meet her Mr. Right in her early forty? At this point, she finally realized an important truth. She should have done the oocyte cryopreservation when she was younger.

IVF 3.0+ is the only choice for her right now. It cost her 1.5 years for 23 oocyte retrievals and 44 oocytes. In the end, she got 6 blastocysts with great appearance (graded above BB). However, the result of PGS showed that 5 were abnormal and 1 has no signal.

What could we do with this situation? We have no choice but take the rest 5 blastocyst, which are not qualified for biopsy, and the blastocyst with a no signal result to do the 2 times transfer.

As you might be curious, how could she do the oocyte retrieval for 23 times in a year? Indeed, to speed up the collection of oocytes, she often need to do the operation twice a month. We call this the D-OPU, which is an innovative protocol for clients with AMH lower than 0.8.

With such a hard work, how can she give up on ERA? The result of ERA indicate that her window of implantation is 132 hours, which is different from most women. With the reference of ERA, we have a success on the first transfer. Unfortunately, the development of embryos did not proceed. The cause of this failure might be the high probability of chromosomal abnormality. They decideded to transfer last 3 blastocysts for the second time transfer. After about 15 days, it turns out the level of beta-HCG is 2635! Although the index of HCG is quite inspiring, we still don’t know the chromosome of the baby is normal or not. Until she has done the Amniocentesis, I finally rest assured and realized that she might be “the oldest pregnant woman with boy and girl twins” in Taiwan. She also broke the record of Stork Fertility Center in 2011: 47-year old IVF with own eggs. I’m extremely grateful for the hard work of our embryologists, the God’s will. Most important of all, her determination and the help from her friend who introduce her to Stork Fertility Center.

There are full of stories behind every lucky pregnancies. Rewind the history of this patient, there are too many “what if?” questions in it. What if she didn’t hesitate to freeze her eggs when she were younger? What if she didn’t meet her helping friend? What if the blastocysts without doing PGS are all chromosomal abnormal? What if we perform biopsy on unqualified blastocysts, and it end up leading to miscarriage? What if she didn’t do the ERA? If she insisted doing transfer on the wrong time, efforts of 23 operations might vanish.

What is the “unseen” question behind every “what if”?

How long and how much would it cost for clients over 43 years old to have a baby? How do we get the answer of this question? My answer is, “You have to ask the correct question.”. The reason is that you can only find a way out in correct direction. People frequently ask, “Where can I find the cheapest IVF treatment? ”. The reality is that it’s not possible to do a skin-deep comparison on professional things. There are too many “unseen” factors under the table. My clients who are considered good-lucked ask the key question in another way, “What is the cheapest way to bring back a baby?”. The difference is on the denominator, the times for the treatment and the number of baby respectively. Asking the right question, both the doctor and the clients are on the same page. With the same goal, we can determine to bring a baby back.