Doctors are warriors. We are never taught to stop fighting whatever it is that we are curing: cancer, infection or infertility. If one treatment fails, we start another, and then another.We fertility doctors are so used to the adulation of bonny babies walking into our consulting rooms with proud parents whom we treated successfully. So if you have an failed IVF cycle, we will tweak the protocol, check your uterus with a hysteroscope, use a different hormone, do an extended culture,scratch your uterine lining, use some 'glue' in the culture and pray hard to give you that pregnancy. If you fail yet again, it will become a personal mission for us: the fertility doctor to get you pregnant.
After three failed cycles, rest assured that we are as worried about getting you to conceive as you are.We will go to any lengths, biopsy the embryos, borrow a sperm, buy an egg, use a surrogate.. just to get there.
In the clamor to conceive, if there is something which is absolutely inconceivable to us, it is the idea of stopping. Our training taught us how to start infertility treatments: it never taught us how or when to stop.It was this blog that got me seriously thinking about the need to draw a line. It is a scientific fact that despite the best quality treatments, a proportion of couples will fail to conceive. In our country, neither insurance, nor government will reimburse or support the treatments which runs into lakhs. Sucked into the whirlpool of hope, the couples will lose all their life savings chasing that elusive goal of a baby. We doctors sit on the other side of the table and lure the couple into trying yet another cycle, refusing to give up, refusing to stop. The couple meanwhile, has their life on hold. Everything else in their lives is waiting for that baby to come: that new house that they mean to buy, that relocation, that new job or degree, the new car.I learnt early on that when I speak to infertile couples, I must bring in adoption. Slowly, I am learning that every couple that failed a cycle, must be given an option to stop their treatment.
Sometimes, the only way to win is to get out of the race, on time. Because you might lose that race, but you might win your life back.
