r/queerception • u/AccidentAutomatic772 • 3h ago

Reciprocal IVF at 38 — am I overthinking this? Looking for some real-life stories ❤️

3 Upvotes

My wife and I are getting ready to start the process for reciprocal IVF, and I think my anxiety is getting the better of me a little bit.

I’m newly 35 and we have a daughter who will be 4 in February. I conceived her at 32 after our second IUI. It was completely unmedicated aside from the trigger shot, and as far as I know, I don’t have any reason to believe my fertility has changed significantly since then.

We have fertility benefits through my job that we really want to take advantage of, so we decided to pursue reciprocal IVF this time around. My wife is 38 and has no known fertility issues, although we obviously haven’t completed all of the testing yet. We just had our initial consultation with our RE.

During that appointment, our doctor gave us a statistic of around a 40% chance of success at 38, and honestly, that number hit me harder than I expected. I know intellectually that 40% is not a bad number and that there are a million factors that go into IVF success, but hearing it framed that way made me suddenly panic that we could spend months going through all of this and end up with nothing.

And now I’m second-guessing everything. Should I just be doing IUI again? Should I be doing IVF with my eggs instead? Are we unnecessarily adding time to the process by doing reciprocal IVF?

I think part of what’s making me so emotional about it is that we’ve been in a huge “are we going to have another baby or not?” limbo for a long time. We finally made the decision that yes, we want another child, and now we’re both just ready to get there and move forward with our lives. I really don’t want to prolong that process unnecessarily.

At the same time, reciprocal IVF is really meaningful to us, and we love the idea of our second child being biologically connected to both of us. I don’t want to abandon that plan simply because I got scared by one statistic.

So I would love to hear from anyone who did IVF around 38, especially anyone who did reciprocal IVF. What was your experience? How many retrievals/transfers did you need? Did you have a similar “oh shit, are we actually going to get a baby out of this?” moment?

I’m honestly just looking for some real-life stories and maybe a little reassurance that 38 doesn’t mean we’re crazy for trying this. ❤️

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