PCOS Stories 8 – Penny’s Pregnancy Struggle

Names have been changed for confidentiality

Penny is a 33 year old woman with PCOS who I have been helping over the last 12 months to conceive.

Prior to that Penny and her husband had been having trouble getting pregnant with PCOS for a long 3 years.

Her menstrual cycles occur anywhere between 8 and 12 weeks, so it was very difficult to know when to try for a baby.

On discussion with Penny she decided to start on the simplest fertility treatment which is called Clomiphene Citrate, and despite increasing doses of the ovulation induction tablet Clomiphene Citrate (Clomid), she did not ovulate at all, and was therefore “Clomid resistant” (see Getting Pregnant With Clomid).

Penny was then stepped up to fertility treatment called FSH (follicle stimulating hormone) ovulation induction and intra-uterine insemination. This is where we inseminate her with her husband’s ‘washed sperm’ right at the time of ovulation. ( see FSH ovulation treatment Getting Pregnant With PCOS: Ovulation Induction in fertility treatment section).

She did ovulate on the FSH and to our disappointment still had not conceived.

The next fertility treatment Penny and her husband commenced on was IVF (Invito-fertilization) treatment.(see Invitro Fertilisation (IVF) – Fertility Treatment). 14 of her eggs were collected from her ovary, and of these 10 embryos were made. I placed 1 embryo back into Penny’s uterus, and 9 others have been frozen.

Her chances of getting pregnant with PCOS on IVF are about 40%… but she did not get pregnant for that cycle.

Many of you reading this may have had a similar frustrating and disappointing experience like Penny who is on the verge of giving up and thinks she will never get pregnant.

My advice is not to give up but keep trying and stay focused and positive… a pregnancy will happen.

At the same time keep healthy by changing to a healthy lifestyle. Stop smoking and drinking, have a healthy weight and that may mean going on a diet to lose some weight.

At the moment Penny has stopped the “getting pregnant” cycle, and is having a couple of months off. She will be returning soon to have a frozen embryo put back into her uterus, and hopefully will conceive then.

If you have similar PCOS stories to this and would like to share them on this website for other women to read then please do so on the contact page. If you do not want your name in your story let me know and I will not put it in.