Hopefully, this never happens to you, but sometimes after adding sperm to egg or injecting sperm into egg, the next morning, we have nothing good to report. Sometimes, we see the sperm swimming around the egg, with no signs of attachment to the egg. Sometimes, sperm attach all over the egg, but the egg looks [...]

Once or twice a year, we would have an IVF case without sperm on the day of retrieval. This problem is rare and happens less than one percent of the time. Anxiety about being able to produce a semen sample on egg retrieval day is something a lot of IVF patients worry about. Fortunately, problems [...]

If you’ve completed your family and still have “excess” embryos in storage at your clinic, you have a choice to make. Storage indefinitely is usually not an option unless you move your embryos to a long term storage facility like ReproTech and are willing to pay for storage forever. Many patients choose to thaw and [...]

When you get pregnant and have your families, and most of you will get there, you might at some point realize that your family is as big as you want it to be, but you still have IVF embryos in a clinic freezer somewhere. What to do? The entire menu of options is: Thaw and [...]

A brief history of the discovery of sperm maps the dead ends and blind alleys traveled by early scientists who were puzzled by human reproduction. It may seem incredible to us today but human sperm weren’t discovered until Anton Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), and his student Johan Ham, used a home-made microscope to look at the swimming “sperm [...]

I am one of those annoying patients who wants to know what her numbers are on the lab test, not just that the result is negative. How negative? What’s the normal range? Can I have a copy of the test? My doctor’s reaction to my questions either kept me in their care or pushed me [...]

Everybody is doing it. Sixty-two percent of IVF cycles performed in the US in 2006 used intra-cytoplasmic sperm injection  (ICSI).  In contrast, only 37.5% of IVF cycle were done using the “traditional IVF” method of simply adding some swimming sperm to a droplet containing one or more eggs, and letting the sperm find the egg, [...]

A reader wanted to know  if I could  post about using drugs from overseas pharmacies so I did a little research and pulled together some internet links for you to read about this topic in more detail if you are interested. It turns out to be a very complicated question with both personal and international [...]

We live in a modern world in which we can fix our medical problems with a pill or surgery or a treatment. Right?  Yes and No. If you want to optimize the chances of getting pregnant with IVF (or without), there are things that you can do before IVF treatment to help yourself get pregnant. [...]

Considering the history of sperm donation in the US, it’s no surprise that we are still struggling with issues surrounding sperm donor secrecy. The first documented case of sperm donation was described in a letter written by Addison Davis Hard,  a medical student in 1884 at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia who describes probably the [...]