Weight, IVF and refusal of treatment

[sushee]

I remember when I was undergoing IVF, my dr made clear my hormone levels were spot on, I ovulated like clockwork. I didn't need loads of FSH to produce a good number of good quality eggs. He told me my fertility issues were not weight related.

But as I had more and more failed cycles, I started to feel perhaps he was wrong. I too got told often 'you should lose weight, it will benefit you even if you don't need to lose it for treatment' and so to 'assist' things, in a 'rest' month, I went on a diet. I exercised and changed my eating patterns and lost 6 kgs.

The next month, I went in for treatment feeling mighty proud that I'd done everything I could to have my long-for baby.

And guess what? I didn't ovulate that month. When my dr expressed his confusion and asked what I was doing differently, I came clean and admitted that I was trying to lose weight. He told me to stop and asked why I would do something that could mess with my cycles when in fact my fertility wasn't weight-related. I stopped dieting, gained a little bit of weight back (as you do) and the next IVF cycle I did, I ovulated, like clockwork, as normal.

What did I learn from that? We are individuals and we should be treated on a case-by-case basis. Infertility is a medical issue that is so diverse and so can be caused by so many things. Why should we be treated with a one-size-fits-all approach?

And you know what? Women undergoing IVF have enough guilt about their infertility without having to yet again have another 'blanket' reason for their failure. If their fertility issues are weight-related (like PCOS) then fair enough. But to assume that my weight is why I'm not conceiving when there is clear indications that that's not the case? Sorry but I refuse to accept that infertile women take on that burden of guilt too just because some Dr is too lazy to investigate thoroughly before turning you away simply based on weight.

And btw, after we had our IVF son, my Dr mentioned in hindsight that he believed reasons for our repeated failure to implant probably had to do with a yet undiagnosed issue with my husband. The problem is that tests for women are exhuastive but for men, there are very few. So all that guilt I had carried about me 'preventing' our success by being overweight was probably for nothing after all.