So, in vitro fertilization means the union of a women's egg with a man's sperm inside a laboratory dish.
The IVF procedure is organized in five steps:
1) Stimulation of the woman's ovaries. The woman is given fertility medications in order to produce more than one egg per month as she usually does. This step of the IVF procedure is also called superovulation. The woman is regulary examined with transvaginal ultrasounds and she takes blood tests in order to check her hormone level.
2)The second step is the egg retrieval. A surgery is performed using ultrasound images as a guide. The doctor inserts a needle in the vagina towards the ovaries and the follicles that contain the eggs. The needle is attached to a suction device that extracts the egg from the follicle. Sometimes the eggs are removed using a pelvic laparoscopy.
3) The sperm is mixed with the egg in a propitious environment. This stage is called insemination. The fertilization takes place after a couple of hours after insemination. When doctors think that the fertilization might not succeed they performe an intracytoplasmic sperm injection, that is they inject the sperm directly into the egg.
4)After the egg is fertilized it becomes an embryo. After another 5 days the embryo's cells start dividing. At this point couples who have a risk of genetic disease should take into consideration pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. The specialists extract a cell from each embryo and analyse it for hereditary diseases.
5)The fifth step consisit in transfering the embryo in the woman's uterus. There's no need for anaesthetic for this procedure. A tube which contains the embryo is inserted in the vagina, through cervix and into the uterus. To increase the chance of pregnancy more embryos can br transferred but this also increases the risk of multiple pregnancies. Embryos that aren't used in the IVF procedure can be frozen for ulterior implantation or donation.
What you should expect after the procedure
Unfortunatelly not all pregnancies result in live birth, that is not all women who undergo IVF procedure can give birth to a child. The procedure depends highly on the woman's age. Studies show that the best rate of success had woman under 35 years.
After the procedure most of the women can go back to their daily activities, but they must take hormone progesterone pills for 10 weeks after the embryo is transferred. A progesterone insufficiency in the first weeks of pregnancy can result in a miscarriage.
