Читать книгу Zita West’s Guide to Getting Pregnant - Zita WEST, Zita West - Страница 37

Christine, who was 34, had had one child with IVF. Two further attempts at IVF had been unsuccessful. She came along to our clinic to see what she could do to improve her chances. Having looked through her questionnaire, apart from the fact that she was tired from coping with a toddler, and also a little bit underweight, there were no obvious lifestyle factors that might be affecting her chances. I went back to basics with her and asked about her cycles and sex, and suggested that, as she had irregular cycles, a session of fertility awareness would benefit her. I could tell she thought that this would be a total waste of time, as she’d been told that she wasn’t ovulating.

‘How do you know you don’t ovulate?’ I asked. She said that when she used the ovulation – predictor kits (see below), nothing happened. When I asked about her cervical secretions, she said she didn’t have any. Then I started to ask about her periods and how long her bleed lasted. Her bleed lasted 7 days, and on the 8th and 9th days there was what she thought was mucus but mixed with the blood; she also thought that this was part of her bleed. Her cycles were quite varied – between 28 and 38 days – so by her calculations if anything were going to happen it wouldn’t be on the 8th or 9th day of her period; it would be much later in the cycle. She was wrong about this.

She went on to conceive naturally a month later.

I could write about many more cases like this, of women who have had IVF when they have never even been offered the most basic kind of help with understanding their fertility.