I previously posted how I had read that female mice who were socially isolated from males other than the dad during the implantation period were more likely to get pregnant:http://3yearwait.blogspot.com/#uds-search-results
Well, it turns out it’s true in women as well:
“The establishment of clinical pregnancy as well as live births were more than 50% higher in the isolated group than in the control.” It continued, “The social isolation [3 days in your house, no men other than the father] … could substantially increase the success rates in IVF or ICSI. While the exact mechanism of this phenomenon is yet to be understood, one possible explanation may be, by analogy with mice, an olfactory block to implantation.”
Look at these statistics! It’s remarkable! The women who were isolated from men were WAAAY more likely to get pregnant.
A few things to note about this study—this was for day three transfers, not day five transfers. That matters because a day 3 embryo will take a few days to implant, while a day 5 embryo will implant sooner. So maybe only a day or two of social isolation (which is generally the impact of bed rest, which most of us are on for at least a day!) is all that’s needed for women using day 5 embryos.
I’d never done purposeful social isolation before (I’d never heard about it before this cycle). For my first cycle I did 2 days of bed rest, and as far as I know that involved not being around any men. Accidental social isolation! But my last FIVE (ugh) cycles I did only one day of rest. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so I scheduled three days out of the office after my transfer. NO MEN ALLOWED.
Then my husband had to go and ruin everything. (Okay, not his fault, he has no idea from day-to-day what my machinations are.) He scheduled a worker to come by and do some quick work at the house. I was not happy, but I was like, well, if my nanny can be here to let him in and talk to him, maybe it won’t be the end of the world…. She was supposed to be here to let him in, but then got caught up. (Note I did not tell her the reason why I wanted her here, so she probably thought it was no big deal if she was running a little late.) So social isolation from men was out the window less than 48 hours after the transfer. Sigh.
I should have just made my husband cancel the worker. As we ladies going through IVF know, even increasing our odds of getting pregnant a few percent is worth a huge sacrifice [I could write a book on the sacrifices I’ve made to this point], and if social isolation from men might increase odds as much as 50% without doing anything more than NOT LETTING ANY FUCKING MEN IN THE HOUSE, that seems like it should not be too hard. Grrrrrrrr.
One thing stopping me from getting too wound about my ruined plan is that scientists think that the mechanism may be related to an “olfactory” (scent) that stops implantation. Well, if my doctors are to be believed, we probably had implantation yesterday. So social isolation for 3 days may matter more for those day-3 transfers than my day-5 transfer. I managed to avoid men for over 36 hours, which should have been enough time for that little hatching B3 to implant. (On a related topic—most clinics used to require 2 days of bed rest, but there’s no scientific evidence it’s needed. CCRM still does 2 days. Maybe any benefit of bed rest, especially the second day when dealing with day 5 transfers, is the social isolation….)
I should mention I tried to avoid contact with the man as much as possible. I opened my garage for him to come in and then called down to him that I was too sick to come down. Does he think I’m a total weirdo? For sure. Would he think I were 1000x stranger if he knew my avoidance of him was because I did not want to smell him and potentially disrupt an embryo from implanting in my uterus? You betcha.
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