Once you’ve made your decision to have IVF, it’s both exciting and a little bit nerve-wracking as you begin to wonder what to expect. Every journey to pregnancy is unique, whether that’s via IVF or not. When it comes down to it, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to fertility, and what works for you, might not work for somebody else. At Verso, we’re big believers in empowering women and people with uteruses to understand their own bodies so you’re equipped with the knowledge you need to make decisions about your own fertility journey.
The IVF journey
Typically, the standard approach to IVF looks something like this: For a number of days at the start of your cycle and depending on your protocol, you’ll take daily fertility medication – usually via self-administered shots – to stimulate your ovaries into producing multiple eggs. During this time, you’ll have regular appointments with your doctor for blood tests and ultrasounds.
Once this phase is done, you’ll attend the clinic for egg retrieval. You can expect to be at the clinic for the day as you’ll be fully briefed on the procedure before given sedation to keep you comfortable and pain free during the retrieval. Your eggs will be combined with your partner or donor’s sperm in a lab to create embryos. Over the next few days, an embryologist will keep a close eye on how well your embryos are growing and will provide you with regular feedback. Three to six days later you’ll need to attend the clinic again for embryo transfer. This is a quick procedure and you won’t need to be at the clinic for too long.
You’ll then need to factor in a two-week wait until you do a pregnancy test to determine if the IVF worked. IVF is amazing and has helped many people to start the family they’ve always dreamed of, but the process leaves a lot of room for variables and requires an element of luck once implantation has taken place. Until now…
Introducing Iris
Following years of innovation and ground-breaking research, we created Iris – a small, device that acts as your eyes inside the uterus, giving you real-time insights into what’s going on inside your body. By measuring dissolved oxygen and temperature of your uterus in real-time over a seven day period, Iris is able to provide personalised insights, data, and knowledge for you and your doctors so you can maximise your chances of IVF success by tailoring your fertility plan to the environment of your uterus.
But how does it work, you ask? While we appreciate the stakes are far higher with your IVF journey, Iris is best described with an analogy rather than cold, medical jargon. Imagine you’re growing a plant – there are a ton of things you’d consider before planting that first little seed. You’d start by nurturing the seedling in a greenhouse, going to painstaking efforts to create the perfect environment for your seedling to thrive. You’d test the soil, monitor the climate, and whatever else to create the optimum environment for that seedling to flourish outside the greenhouse.
This is essentially what Iris allows us to measure in the uterus during the IVF journey, enabling us with the right data to create a plan for when the optimum time would be to implant the embryo.
Iris and your IVF journey
Wherever you are on your IVF journey, whether you’re just starting to think about it or you’re feeling frustrated after a failed round, we’re here to help. At Verso, we firmly believe that every single body is unique, which means no two uteruses should be treated with a one-size-fits-all approach.
We know how difficult and frustrating the IVF journey can be. But with a highly personalised insight into your uterus, Iris shines a light on women’s health and ensures there are fewer blind spots in your IVF journey, giving you the absolute best chance of success for your embryos. By understanding what’s actually happening in your uterus, it allows you and your clinician to have informed and empowered discussions about your health, treatment paths, and IVF journey.
Get in touch today to find out more about how Iris can help you on your IVF journey.
