sophoapz on "Need advice on choosing a new clinic"

Hi everyone,

So I wanted to get some opinions on how to choose a new clinic. We have now had 2 failed fresh cycles at our local clinic, so thankful we chose the shared risk refund plan. The first cycle, neither recipient got pregnant and no embryos made it to day 5 so they felt it was a donor issue. The second cycle they only got 3 eggs, only 1 fertilized so we transferred back the 1 poor quality embryo. On top of the poor results medically, we have felt very poorly treated by the nursing staff, its been impossible to get any information from them on how the donor is doing, they didn’t tell us we only had 1 embryo until I was already naked waiting for transfer and then wouldn’t give me my beta number until after the second one, even though I asked for it. Finally, their success rates have gotten worse in the last couple of years. So needless to say we are pretty unhappy and ready to move on.

I think we’ve narrowed it down to 2 choices but both have their pros and cons.

Clinic 1 is a second local clinic. They have had large increases in success rates in the last couple of years and are now up to 71% for a fresh cycle for DE. About 25% for FET. They have a shared risk plan for 36,000 for 3 cycles. This includes everything but donors and my meds. So the pros are obviously that it is local, we could cycle as soon as we found a donor we liked. And if it didn’t work out, we would get back the whole 36,000, we’d only be out the cost of meds. The cons are that we did do 1 cycle with them with our eggs back in 2007 and weren’t very happy with our Dr. We felt he was pretty old school and didn’t really think outside the box at all. We have a consult set up with a different Dr in the practice, but I’m afraid they might all be a bit old school. The clinic was also not very nice inside, seemed old and run down. But they have now moved to a new building so I will see when I go for the consult.

Clinic 2 we’re considering is SDFC. They have great success rates (over 80% for fresh and 50% for FET). The cost for 1 cycle would probably be close to the same cost as the local clinic if we do their success guarantee plan with some money back if it doesn’t work. But we would be out a lot more than local clinic, and its only 1 try plus FET at SDFC. I like how we would get to choose our donor and they seem great from what I understand about being open and sharing information etc. But the cons are that we would have to travel. This is complicated because DH doesn’t get tons of vacation time and I cannot travel during the semester (so between the middle of January and the end of May). So we would have to wait until June, which feels so far away.

So any thoughts on which way to go? I really feel so torn between the 2 options. Any questions or issues I’m not thinking of that I should ask about at the 2 consults?

Thanks

Shannon