When a patient hurts, the physician hurts too

I try to do my very best for all my patients.  As an IVF specialist, I would love to see all my patients get pregnant during their first treatment cycle.  Regrettably, this doesn’t always happen.  IVF specialists have to learn to cope with disappointments for their patients.  I recently had a young woman as a patient who was experiencing unexplained infertility.  It seemed as though she would be an easy case.  She was young with good ovarian response and her partner was an excellent sperm source.  We began the IVF cycle and collected several eggs from her.  I told her that her chance of conception was excellent. 

Unfortunately, when I did a “fertilization check” the next day, only one of her eggs was fertilized.  She had what is termed “total fertilization failure”, meaning she had no embryos to implant into her uterus.  I was very disappointed and she was devastated.  There was no medical reason for her eggs not to fertilize.  She was heartbroken over her perceived waste of time, money and resources but offered no other complaints.  Total fertilization failure is so unpredictable that it’s always unexpected.  It occurs in less than 5% of IVF patients. 
I was as upset as she was and felt I had let my patient down.One of the reason doctors choose the medical profession is because we like helping patients. We are human and have a heart - and when things don't go as planned, we share our patient's heartache, even though we know that lots of things in medicine are out of our control !

This story has a happy ending. The patient was well-informed and understood that this complication could not have been foreseen.She said - " Well, at least now we know why I was not getting pregnant all these years !" We did an ICSI cycle for her after a break of one month - and she has a gorgeous 3 months old daughter now !