First, you will need to schedule a new patient consult (either online, by phone, or in person). At that time, your physician will outline a treatment plan, and you will meet your IVF coordinator, who will review your IVF calendar with you, as well as order all medications to your home via a speciality pharmacy. If it has not been done in the last year, you would also need to receive a hydrosonogram. Ideally, we would like you to make one trip to Boise prior to your IVF cycle, but this is not 100% necessary.
You will start your IVF cycle with a 9–15 day period of ovarian stimulation using hormone injections, which our IVF coordinators will train you to administer yourself. Throughout ovarian stimulation, you will need to receive regular monitoring through ultrasounds and blood tests, which we will help you coordinate locally. Following this period, you will come to Boise for your egg retrieval, which is performed as an outpatient procedure under sedation or anesthesia. You can either provide a fresh sperm sample on the day of the egg retrieval, or you can use a sample which has already been collected and cryopreserved.
Following insemination, the embryos will be cultured in the lab for 5–7 days, at which point an embryo can either be transferred back into the uterus for fresh embryo transfer, or it can be frozen for a frozen embryo transfer (FET). For a fresh embryo transfer, patients typically remain in Boise until the day of transfer. However, for FET, which is the more common choice, patients typically choose to go home, as they will need to undergo 3–4 weeks of hormone treatments to prepare the uterus prior to transfer. This is the minimum amount of time between retrieval and transfer, but you can choose to wait longer. Additionally, with FET, you will have the option of doing pre-genetic screening on the embryos, which typically takes 1–2 weeks.
Most patients arrive in Boise 1–2 days prior to their embryo transfer and travel home the day of or the day after. Approximately 10–14 days after the embryo transfer, you will receive a pregnancy blood test.
