OHSS

I wasn't going to post again today, but having spent some time mining google for information regarding mild/moderate OHSS and whether it's safe/advisable to go ahead with IVF regardless, I thought I would document my findings - which basically amount to a complete lack of clarity. Whenever someone posts in a forum saying that they have symptoms of OHSS and asking whether they should go ahead anyway, they get a barrage of 'don't do it' responses from people who went ahead with it and got very sick. That being said, some of these people then go on to say that they survived the OHSS and delivered healthy babies... and some, very sadly, go on to speak of heartbreaking miscarriage - but these posts are not sufficiently scientific for me to conclusively ascertain whether the OHSS and the miscarriage were linked or whether they were just a set of tragic co-incidences. As it is I am still hopeful that I will wake up tomorrow and the situation will have resolved itself overnight... (I am closely related to a rather fetching ostrich), but for the benefit of people considering IVF tourism I feel like I should address the issues regardless of whether or not they give us more than a day or two of worry.

As I mentioned before OHSS will be exacerbated by pregnancy, so if you have mild, (or even no symptoms), before implantation then the overwhelming likelihood is that they will get worse. This may amount to weeks of discomfort and inactivity or, it may result in being taken into hospital because the water being collected by your follicles eventually floods your abdominal cavity and lungs - which necessitates medical intervention to regularly drain the build up and replace the fluid/vitamins etc. that are bypassing your system. Another consideration is that, if you implant two embryos and both of them take, then the flood of hcg will be double the ordinary influx, considerably aggravating any possible case of OHSS. If the doctor advises, or you decide, not to go ahead, then you will have to wait at least a month before you can transfer any frozen embryos. So for people considering travelling to Europe for IVF, OHSS is a real consideration that you might want to preempt with some thought. I wouldn't for a minute advise that you let the possibility stand in the way of trying, since your statistical chances of developing OHSS to any kind of detrimental degree are not excessive - but you should definitely give the issue some thought so that you are not entirely blindsided by the eventuality. Up to this point, the only thing that we thought might prevent an embryo transfer was a lack of embryos - so, as a very good friend of mine used to say to me - 'learn from the mistakes of others, you won't live long enough to make them all yourself'.