Fetal Heart Rate

I learned to worry about fetal heart rate with my first pregnancy, when I hurried to the computer after each visit with my reproductive endocrinologist, anxious to see if my pregnancy was progressing normally. We were able to hear a heartbeat as early as at the end of week 5, which was a milestone we were happy to reach, but once we were able to measure the heart rate, I began to feel apprehensive.

Intralipid Infusion: A Possible Solution to Failed Implantations and Early Miscarriages

After my last miscarriage, my doctor tested me for blood clotting problems. The tests came out negative. That was not necessarily good news because we still had no explanation for the failed pregnancy. Implanting a perfect, genetically tested embryo in a healthy uterus did give me the best possible chance of getting pregnant, but it did not help me stay pregnant. I had officially joined the list of women with multiple unexplained miscarriages.

hCG Levels: What Do They Tell Us, and Why Should We Care

If you are doing infertility treatments, chances are your doctor will have you test your human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) hormone levels about 12 days after your procedure to determine if you are pregnant. hCG can be detected in one’s urine or blood, but a home pregnancy test will not show you the amount of this hormone, only whether you have enough of it to be considered pregnant. Knowing the actual level on a given date, however, is important if you want to be sure that the pregnancy is going well in its early stages.

Endometrial Scratching

Your in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle has failed, and you do not know why. You had diligently followed your IVF protocol, had several eggs successfully retrieved and fertilized, then screened the embryos for chromosomal abnormalities and had at least one normal embryo. You also have no anatomical anomalies, your uterine lining was triple-layered and thick enough, and the embryo transfer procedure had gone smoothly. Still, your pregnancy test came out negative. What do you do? Repeat the same steps and hope for better luck? If the answer is yes, you might also want to consider endometrial scratching. It could help tilt the scales in the other direction.