Episode 192: The Importance of Celebrating Small Wins: Mandy’s IVF Journey

Mandy Menaker: We thought it would be pretty easy to conceive. We didn’t expect any challenges on the way. And then, lo and behold, around a year later, we said, okay, maybe there’s something that we need to take a look at. I trusted my gut and said I’m not going to keep trying. I’m not going to waste another six months feeling disappointed every month. So, I reached out to my friend Julie. She works at Progyny. And she was really helpful pointing me towards some different clinics that would take our insurance in New Jersey.

Julie Campbell: Mandy didn’t know if she was even allowed to see a fertility specialist. Ever since the inception of IVF in the late 1970s, infertility, is defined as the inability of opposite sex partners to achieve conception after at least one year of unprotected intercourse and or the inability of opposite sex partners to achieve conception after six months of unprotected intercourse when the female partner trying to conceive is age 35 or older. So, whether it’s intentional or unintentional, this definition can be found in a lot of medical healthcare insurance policies, and it serves as a barrier to accessing care. To put it simply, if you don’t meet this narrow, outdated definition of infertility, you can’t access infertility treatment coverage that may be available to you. They’ve updated the definition of infertility to be inclusive of everyone. So, if you feel like seeing a fertility doctor might help in any way, you’re probably right. Leading up to IVF, Mandy and Eric were hopeful and even a little bit excited, but when it came time for treatment to start, Mandy did experience some hurdles.

Mandy Menaker: Nurses always say, once you’ve done the transfer, not to take an at home pregnancy test. My nurse confirmed that about 99% of people do not listen to that advice, because you’re very excited. So, the first time that it came back positive, I broke down crying and I showed my husband, but it almost didn’t feel real, because at this point, it had been about two years of trying. Going into that pregnancy, I think we were a lot more confident in knowing that we had put in a healthy embryo than we would have been, had we only conceived naturally. And so, I think that is one of the amazing benefits of IVF, the fact that even though it’s a lot of work to get there, that you can pretest an embryo. 

Julie Campbell: Finally, after three IVF retrieval cycles and one embryo transfer. Mandy was pregnant. Mandy and Eric went through a lot, but at the end of the day, they reached their goal, and about eight months later, Mandy decided that she wanted to share some of what she learned from this experience, so she wrote an article titled, What a “Difficult Fertility Journey Taught me About Being a Better Communicator” for the website, PR Daily.

Mandy Menaker: I decided to write an article detailing my experience and some of the lessons that I learned on the way. A huge part of writing that article was just wanting to get in front of more people that might not know that others are going through this. And in that article, I included some of the different tips and some of the things that I had learned along the way. So, I actually think the thing that was the most meaningful and the most fun was celebrating milestones on the way to your end goal. And this was actually a tip I had originally gotten from Julie at Progyny. So maybe on night five, I would order delivery food from my favorite restaurant, and on night ten, I would plan to meet a friend out for dinner. And then after the retrieval, I would plan one big gift for myself.

Julie Campbell: Yes, that is actually a go-to piece of advice that I always give people all of the time when they come to me for help. IVF is a long road, and as someone who has undergone two egg retrievals and is currently in the process of creating embryos, I can tell you firsthand that there are some major ups and there are some major downs we can’t control exactly what’s going to happen in the end, and that’s a struggle, the loss of control. So go ahead, when something good happens in your cycle, regardless how minor, like having the courage to inject yourself for the first time, a good evaluation or an encouraging sonogram, at a monitoring appointment – allow yourself to celebrate even just a little. Take joy where you can find it on the journey.