Without any fertility treatments, the chance of getting pregnant naturally is 10% each month. With IVF, the chance of pregnancy is about 40%. Seems kinda low for all of the science behind it - I remember my sister being really shocked during our first IVF cycle when she heard those stats. We did ask our doctor's office and below are their stats of live births for women less than 35:
- 60% have singletons
- 38.6% have twins
- 1.2% have triplets
We definitely acknowledge that there is a chance that we could both get pregnant with multiples - but we think the chances are pretty slim. I admit that we may be numb to the "risk of multiples" - since we've been doing treatments for the past 5 years that have had the risk of giving us multiples. And I can't say that the financial aspect isn't a factor in this decision - the embryo transfer costs the same whether you transfer one or more embryos. So part of it is to increase our chances in this cycle - so that we don't have to pay for another cycle.
The other reason that we are choosing to move forward with the double transfer this week is because after producing all of the eggs on Thursday, my body is "ready" to receive the embryos. Besides the progesterone shots - I'm not having to take any additional medications to get ready. The money thing comes into play here again - because if we did a separate FET cycle later - then we'd be paying more to get my body ready to accept the embryos.
Like Dr. Williams has been telling us for years, all fertility treatment decisions have emotional, physical, and financial aspects. From a financial perspective, with all of the money we've spent on previous treatments and how much we're spending on this cycle itself - we are choosing to be a little more aggressive by including my sister and doing the double transfer. Physically, my sister and I are in good health (doing well with all of the medications thus far) and ready to be pregnant. And emotionally, the ultimate goal is just to have greater than zero babies. And transferring two embryos into each of us should increase the chances of us getting there. We definitely know that carrying multiples has its risks (for the mom/aunt and the babies). But at the end of the day, if we only transferred one embryo into each of us this week and nobody got pregnant - we would definitely regret not transferring two. And even though things would definitely be insanely crazy in our house if we somehow ended up with two sets of multiples from this cycle - I know that we would never ever regret it. Like my husband has said, "We are ready for a new sets of problems." From our perspective, having too many babies sounds much better than where we are today.