Big Fat Negative: TTC, fertility, infertility and IVF

Genevieve Thurley is a busy woman, what with her 1 million followers and career as a makeup artist and content creator. But today, she's making time to talk to us about her experiences of infertility and IVF.

Trigger warning: this episode covers Thurley's jourrrrney all the way until its conclusion - ie. giving birth. If you're not ready to listen yet, don't! Or stop at the first ad break, which is when she starts discussing pregnancy and birth in earnest.

We've also got Ed Coats, medical director at The Evewell West London, talking about natural killer cells -- what's the deal with them?

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Hi, we're Emma and Gabby from BFN, the UK's biggest podcast about infertility and IVF. We're on our eighth series now, but at the beginning we shared our own IVF journeys. If you'd like to hear about them, go back to the first series of the podcast. You'll get to know us better that way, too.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Cathy Adams is the travel news features editor for The Times and Sunday Times -- and also a person who has spent years trying to conceive her second child. Now, she's at a crossroads: give up IVF and reconcile herself to having one child, or keep adding to the £40,000 it's already cost her? Secondary infertility has never felt so difficult.

Meanwhile, Emma provides an update on her endometriosis story, as Ed Coats, medical director at The Evewell West London, addresses the treatment options for endometriosis patients who are trying to conceive. Is IVF the only answer?

You can find out more about the baby loss and miscarriage charity Gabby mentions, Chasing Rainbows, at https://www.chasingrainbowscharity.com/. You can find Hannah Vaughan-Jones' Substack at https://hannahvaughanjones.substack.com/.

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Hi, we're Emma and Gabby from BFN, the UK's biggest podcast about infertility and IVF. We're on our eighth series now, but at the beginning we shared our own IVF journeys. If you'd like to hear about them, go back to the first series of the podcast. You'll get to know us better that way, too.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This week we're joined by Tristan Taylor, the founder of Mandrology, who is biohacking his way to sperm health. He explains why sperm quality is a biomarker of health, in the same way that heart rate and blood pressure is -- and what you can do to improve it.

Meanwhile, Emma Whitney, director of embryology and genetics at The Evewell, explains why not all add-ons are made equal -- and why timelapse embryo imaging is one of the good ones.

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Hi, we're Emma and Gabby from BFN, the UK's biggest podcast about infertility and IVF. We're on our eighth series now, but at the beginning we shared our own IVF journeys. If you'd like to hear about them, go back to the first series of the podcast. You'll get to know us better that way, too.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oonagh Pickering is one of the research nurses at Tommy's whose study on graduated miscarriage care has already changed how the Scottish NHS approaches care after pregnancy losses -- and now they want England to make a change, too. Oonagh joins us to talk about how offering extra care following first and second miscarriages, including progesterone for threatened miscarriages, extra scans and mental health care, could help to prevent up to 10,000 miscarriages a year in the UK.

Meanwhile, Ed Coats, medical director at The Evewell, West London, joins us to talk about rest after embryo transfers -- do you need to?

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Hi, we're Emma and Gabby from BFN, the UK's biggest podcast about infertility and IVF. We're on our eighth series now, but at the beginning we shared our own IVF journeys. If you'd like to hear about them, go back to the first series of the podcast. You'll get to know us better that way, too.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The sourdough baker Martha de Lacey joins us this week: she has run the full gamut of infertility experiences, from going solo to recurrent miscarriage to secondary infertility. "It's so difficult when you give yourself this story of why things happened and the meaning behind it," she says. "Actually it's just nonsense. It's all just luck."

Emma Whitney from The Evewell also joins us to explain why some embryos survive and others don't.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.