It was just as I finished reading A Baby at Last!: The Couple’s Complete Guide to Getting Pregnant–from Cutting-Edge Treatments to Commonsense Wisdom by Zev Rosenwaks, M.D., Marc Goldstein, M.D. and Mark L. Fuerst that we discovered we were pregnant. However, before that point, I was thinking that background in dealing with infertility might be something very valuable for us.
Generally, doctors say that a couple is infertile if they have been trying to get pregnant for a year and have not yet succeeded. We’d been trying for nearly a year and a half, and during that time, we had observed that I had extremely irregular menstrual cycles — the shortest were about 40 days and the longest over 100 [1]. Even though we weren’t planning jumping straight from there to high tech fertility treatments, we did want to understand what the different options were before we started talking to our doctor about fertility issues.
A Baby At Last seems quite thorough. It is generally optimistic about a couple’s chances of conceiving through fertility treatments, but it is also realistic about the risk factors involved, especially age. The book is rather technical at times, but that’s overall a good thing, since it helps the reader understand when different options are applicable. The book also has a number of chapters on specialized subjects — e.g., fertility issues for cancer patients — which I just skimmed but which seem like they would be valuable for those in the specific situation.
The book contained a chapter on alternative medicine techniques. The authors managed to say, in a way that wasn’t too condescending toward those considering such techniques, that there is little evidence that they work and that when they do show some positive effect, it seems like it’s more or less due to general stress reduction. This seems much more useful than the insulting and condescending attitudes adopted by many folks speaking up against alternate techniques. Yes, they are pseudoscience, but rudeness isn’t going to convince the people who don’t realize that.
Although I don’t have other books to compare this too, overall, this seems like a good resource for a couple who wants to understand their options for fertility treatments.
[1] As an aside, one thing that was frustrating on our journey to pregnancy was that our doctor encouraged us to wait a year before coming back and talking about fertility, even though, at that point, I had only had one period in the six months since I went off the pill, and I probably (based on temperatures) hadn’t ovulated. Statistics are hard to come by, but such a pattern generally indicates some sort of issue.