Inconceivable

For some reason, I chose to watch a new television show on NBC, called Inconceivable. Maybe I watched because I like Ming-Na as a actress. Maybe I watched because I've been there at the fertility office, and I wondered if television could/would get it correct.

Well the short answer is, NO, they got it all wrong. The long answer is they completely made it up, and no one on the show, no writer, and not even the craft service guy has EVER been to fertility clinic.

The show starts with a man holding a specimen cup, watching what appears to be the start of a porn. He appears to be needing to produce a semen sample. The camera pans out to two staff members standing outside the door snickering. One makes a comment "This will take a while, he picked one with a plot." Now, having done this, the staff treated us with complete professionalism and privacy. We did this in Utah, and there were magazines in a drawer in the room, but no Video. There was a sign offering that there are other rooms if more privacy is needed. The room had a deadbolt and a flip lock. Lousy elevator music was piped into the room. The staff deals with this EVERY day, they stop snickering, unless someone is excited to head in there, I am sure.

The doctor in the show could be one of the doctors from Nip/Tuck. He appears to be an arrogant, egotistical, womanizing, cad of a doctor. He seems proud that he transplanted 5 embryos into one woman at once. This is just not done by ethical doctors today. Great advances in embryo grading allows them to implant the highest quality embryos. They grade embryos with an A, B, C or a 1, 2, 3 and so on. My reproductive endocrinologist typically will only transplant 2 quality embryos. He will on occasion, do three. Transplanting 5 is insane, who wants to have 5 babies at once? In France, they are moving toward implanting one embryo at a time. Increasing the number of embryos DOES NOT increase the possibility of pregnancy, it increases the likely hood of complications. Do you really think that the minister and his wife are going to undergo selective reduction, which some consider an abortive technique?

• This doctor seem proud of couples who have undergone 6 IVF procedures. He said he pushed them when they were ready to give up. Is that entirely ethical? Aren't doctors supposed to educate and let their patients make the decision? How many patients has he pressed, and it not worked? According to American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) information provided in their FAQ " IVF currently accounts for about 99% of ART procedures with GIFT, ZIFT and combination procedures making up the remainder. The average live delivery rate for IVF in 2000 was 29.9 per cent per retrieval--a little better than the 20 per cent chance in any given month that a reproductively healthy couple has of achieving a pregnancy and carrying it to term." ART procedures are those which are advanced, and do not include artificial insemination, medication treatments and other less advanced treatments. In an ART treatment, the Egg is removed from the female, and combined with the sperm in one of several different techniques. These odds of success are not cumulative, each attempt has the same success possibility as the one before. Think of this as a roulette wheel or a throw of the dice. What happened in the previous attempt has no bearing on the chances of success in this attempt. Your doctor may have learned something about your situation to give better medical advice, but the odds remain the same. What this means is that you can have 43 attempts at IVF, and still not get pregnant. ASRM is the foremost organization of fertility treatment, like the American Pediatrics Association is the foremost organization for pediatricians. For a better explanation, visit their website. They are well respected and publish scholarly and peer reviewed research.
• The drugs given during these treatments are powerful and have strong side effects. Concerns continue to exist that these drugs may contribute to various cancers. They cause hormonal swings, and can be tough for the person receiving them. They are expensive, and are usually not covered by insurance.
• IVF is very expensive. According to ASRM, the average cost in the USA for an IVF procedure is $12, 400. How is the minister and his wife paying for this? How is the Private paying for this? IVF, and infertility treatments for that matter, are not covered by TriCare, the military health insurance. At the clinic I go to, finances and how to pay for this is included in the INITIAL IVF consultation. It us usually not covered by insurance. ASRM states, and I agree with this: "The desire to have children and be parents is one of the most fundamental aspects of being human. People should not be denied insurance coverage for medically appropriate treatment to fulfill this goal."
• Egg freezing is pretty hard to do. It is usually only done as a last resort for women who are about to under go chemo, and don't have a partner, or women who are trying to preserve their fertility and don't have a partner. I cannot imagine WHY those eggs were not frozen fertilized. It is 100 times easier to freeze and thaw an embryo than an egg. It is very simple to freeze sperm. Something about the sperm makes the freezing and thawing process easier. They have been having success with taking a slice of the ovary of the woman with the undeveloped eggs in it, freezing that, and then surgically placing that back into the ovary at a later date. The whole scenario just makes no sense. And what was up with the dead wife's sister going to be mommy to the baby, not aunt, and they call the press to shout about it as a positive? Completely unrealistic, and if it were to happen, illegal. Thanks to HIPAA, privacy laws are very strict, and the doctor would be open to huge sanctions if they just call the papers without getting permission from the patient first. Did the Doctor EVEN think about what would happen to the baby in the future when it is know how his conception and pregnancy occurred?
• The doctor tells his patients that once they have their baby, the infertility treatments will all be a bad memory and they will forget it. That again is not true. Getting pregnant, having a baby, or adopting a child DO NOT resolve the feelings and issues surrounding infertility. This is likened to having a baby, it dies, and replacing it with another child. Infertility has its own set of grief, pain, issues and stresses, and these are not just swept away by becoming a parent. Look at what happened to Brooke Shields, he FINALLY had her longed for IVF baby, and ended up having postpartum depression. Here baby did not cure her miscarriage or take away her pain on this. Her baby did not remove her pain from the years to treatments, and the disappointment of seeing her period when she REALLY wanted to not see it. Her baby did not remove her grief over the years she did not have a child. It is not that easy. Telling people that it is that easy does a GREAT disservice to those pursuing treatments. What happens to them when they still have pain after giving birth?
• In the show, they showed sperm sitting unlocked in a fridge. I've seen how they store sperm at my clinic. It is frozen in little pipettes, and kept under lock and key. Several layers of security exist, and no one person holds all the keys to get to the sperm. Sperm is processed and frozen the same day it is produced. Quality and other factors demand this. Sperm is not kept in specimen bottles in an unlocked fridge for some undetermined amount of time. Sperm is labeled and coded. Names are not on the pipettes, bar codes are. Again, there are several layers of protection to ensure that the sperm you get is the sperm you wanted. I highly doubt that a spurned office worker could switch the sperm. From what I saw, it can't happen. Side note, it appears she obtained his sperm sample by giving him a BJ, and spitting the sperm into the specimen cup. Well, saliva is very harmful to sperm. Why, you ask? One of the main ingredients in semen is fructose, and saliva begins to digest this in your mouth. So saliva starts digesting the sperm, if the oral method of retrieval is used, while it is in the cup. When we went for the semen analysis, we were instructed to not use saliva in any form. Another day, I'll post what fun getting a semen sample is. Saliva is also full of bacteria, and if it were to be inserted into the uterus, well, it could cause all sorts of infections.
• Most couples who pursue infertility treatments succeed before they need IVF. I would hate for America to get the impression that IVF is the only treatment out there. Several less invasive and expensive treatments exist and are successful in achieving pregnancy.

I'm not even going to touch the fact that they are making surrogacy seem very routine. Surrogacy is VERY rare. It is illegal in several states. I'm also not going to talk about the fact they are running a surrogacy program at the same location as a fertility clinic. These are usually run in separate locations. They may use certain doctors, but they are usually separate entities.

It appears this show was written by people who have NO current knowledge of modern infertility practice. They appear to have no desire to show what real infertility treatment is like, rather they are going for the sensational and absurd. This performs a GREAT disservice to the many people who have to seek help getting pregnant. I hope that no one is turned away from treatment by this biased and inaccurate show. It should have a disclaimer, that this show has no real bearing on real infertility treatment.

I have been very satisfied by the care I received from my reproductive endocrinologist(RE). However to read another view of an office visit with him, click here. Her experience is toward the bottom, and she calls him "Big Shot RE" which I think I will call him as well. I feel pretty bad about how they were treated, because I referred them to him, based on my very positive experience with him. WHY does it matter who you love when you want to get pregnant? I feel a bit like a traitor to my friends, but if I have to go for fertility treatments, I'll go see him because he is very good. I will give him a piece of my mind in my next visit about how he treated my friends, and request he be more sensitive to families where there are same sex parents. The desire to parent is not limited to the married community, and my friends had the same goal as DH and I do. They wanted, and succeeded, to become parents. Off soap box, sorry for the sideline.

If you really want to know what infertility treatment is like, check out Resolve.org