Nothing Gained by Saying No- A True Patient Story

I'm Dr. Michael DiMattina, Founder of Dominion Fertility in Arlington, Virginia. One of my favorite expressions is nothing was ever gained by saying no. Another expression that I often use when I teach medical students, interns and residents is that we don't treat numbers, we treat patients. Today I have a patient story I would like to share with you.

This was a woman who came to me early in 2017 at the age of 43.  She had been seen by another local infertility clinic and was told that her serum FSH level was too high, and that she could only get pregnant using egg donor IVF. Interestingly this lady still had regular menstrual cycles at the age of 43, so that meant she ovulated regularly each month.  However, her FSH and AMH indicated that her egg quantity was extremely low. I told her we could give you a chance and see how this goes. I used a stimulation protocol from my old days in IVF called the Stop Lupron protocol and she did make two follicles.  I told her many IVF programs would simply cancel your cycle because they require a minimum of three follicles before proceeding with the egg collection.

However, here at Dominion Fertility, we make babies all the time with one egg, one embryo, so I offered her a chance. She accepted, remember nothing was ever gained by saying no.  Sure enough we went ahead and did the collection and we got two eggs both fertilized and both grew to blastocyst embryos.  We then tested the embryos during an embryo biopsy for preimplantation genetic screening or PGS. Dominion Fertility is one of the leaders in the United States for PGS.  We found that one of her two blastocyst embryos was genetically normal.

We were able to transfer that single embryo into her, which resulted in pregnancy.  I just sent her back to her OBGYN for pregnancy care and delivery. We are so thrilled for this patient.  I called her OBGYN yesterday and he was incredulous as to how we could make this happen.  He was elated, as well as his patient with Dominion Fertility!