I have thought long and hard about writing this review, but I feel like other people who are about to start the ivf journey should absolutely be aware of the issues I experienced. Also, for the record, I got pregnant at SHER, so I am not bitter. I think it is awful to dismiss other reviews for this reason.
The first, but perhaps not the biggest, problem is that clinic is extremely disorganized. When you find out that they have ordered the wrong medication (occasionally at great expense) on the day that you are supposed to be starting treatment, the stress that is added to the entire experience is exponential, because then it is up to you to run around town to find a specialty pharmacy that has the meds in stock, some of which are further constrained by national shortages. The problem here is that the nurse practitioners are made to double up as administrative co-ordinators, a nurse should support the medical process and a co-ordinator should guide you through the process. Having now experienced a clinic where the co-ordinators support the nurses, it is a far more effective system and creates a much more supportive culture. Every time something went wrong, which was pretty much weekly, no one took responsibility, never mind that no one apologized and the next time I went in everyone looked more and more terrified and harried, but because taking responsibility was for some reason impossible, it meant that no one would offer to help fix the problem. It was very obvious that the staff below the Dr level were not getting the support they needed.
Another huge problem with this clinic is that for the first embryo transfer they took far too long to transfer the embryo into my body. The embryo should not be outside of storage or the body for more than a few seconds, 30 seconds is a long time for this process, and for my first transfer it took a few minutes. This was because they were were understaffed and using a less experienced sonogram operator. They admitted to me that the operator was less experienced and that they were understaffed because of Thanksgiving. I understand that Thanksgiving is a holiday, but in most cases the Dr is in charge of managing your cycle, so they could prevent this via closer management or better staffing. As a patient we go through an awful lot to get a viable egg. We started with 11 and ended up with 3, so losing 1 through carelessness is pretty epic.
The final issue I will share with you is that they told me that the genetic sequencing of the embryo is a waste of money. I have since found out that not only is this not true but that if an egg is genetically determined to be a good egg, a woman in her 40s is almost as likely to get pregnant as a woman in her 20s. The older you get the less good eggs you have. I don't know why they missled us? IVF is split into 2 halves, egg retrieval (out of you to be fertilized) and then the fertilized egg is transferred back into you. The egg retrieval is reasonably easy, 2 weeks of tiny under the skin injections, but the transfer is far more intense with months of bigger injections into the muscle. Perhaps because if we had determined that more eggs were not viable they would not have been able to charge us for as many transfers and they would have made less money?
My advice is to find a clinic that has not been bought as a commercial enterprise and is not run as a business.
Good luck. read more