"Let’s be optimistic” is not a treatment plan

New here? The IVF Guide Clinics Won’t Give You is where most readers begin - so you walk into your first consultation already knowing what to do.

Hey readers,

This time two years ago, I was coming out the other side of my first IVF cycle at a clinic in Spain. Alone, and wondering what had just happened. That’s what I’m writing about today.

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The call was scheduled for 11am. By 12.15pm the phone still hadn’t rung. I had to email and phone the clinic. When the call finally came, I was shaking.

“All three of your embryos are aneuploid. Not compatible with life, according to PGT-A. The best option for you is donor eggs.”

The doctor explained, briefly, why they couldn’t lead to a successful pregnancy. My mind was whirring and I felt sick. I managed to ask whether diet or supplements might improve egg quality for another round with my own eggs. I don’t remember his exact words. It just seemed that he had already moved on.

That cycle cost me €11,000. I was processed like a number by a clinic I thought I’d chosen carefully.

Weeks before, I’d asked my doctor what seemed to me a reasonable question. “What’s Plan B? Can we make a treatment plan?”

His answer: “Let’s be optimistic.”

Let’s be optimistic is not a treatment plan. It felt like being patted on the head — and I accepted it. That was the moment I should have paid attention to.

Here is the position you’re in when you do this solo, past 40: the doctor holds all the information, and you hold all the risk. How much information they choose to share with you is another matter. You’re left trying to work through appointments, decisions and invoices - alone - while assuming that your doctor is always working in your best interests.

When you’re scared and uncertain, optimism from a doctor feels like kindness. Sometimes it is kindness. It can also be a way of not answering the question.

I did what most women in my position do. I researched the clinic — success rates, patient reviews, years of experience, a polished website. None of it reveals how a doctor answers a direct question.

Clinics get vetted. Doctors rarely are. One woman’s glowing experience tells you very little, because every doctor within a clinic is different, and IVF is closer to an art than a science — the same woman could be offered two entirely different approaches by two doctors in the same building.

There were red flags from the outset — that answer was one of them. But I didn’t know what a red flag looked like. I just thought he was being positive.

Asking the question is half of it. Waiting for a sensible answer is the other half.

• Can we make a written plan, including what happens if this cycle fails?

• Who calls me with results, and when?

• Donor eggs are not an option for me. Is my position on that understood and respected here?

The test isn’t whether the doctor tolerates your questions. It’s whether they answer them. A doctor who deflects a planning question at the outset is showing you exactly how he’ll handle bad news.

I came off that phone devastated by the news and numb from what came with it: the suggestion that my own eggs were unusable, and my best option for a baby was another woman’s egg.

I was alone. Nobody in my life knew what I was going through that day. So I turned to the fertility socials — a few women I’d connected with and never met.

Nine months after that first suggestion to use a donor egg — the next doctor recommended it too — I became pregnant with my own egg. Naturally conceived, with a known donor.

You’re solo — but not alone.

Sarah

PS. The 5-Step Roadmap exists so your first cycle doesn’t cost you €11,000 and the anguish mine did. Steps 3 and 4 cover choosing the clinic and managing the consultation.

Solo Fertility 40s is independent guidance for solo women over 40 navigating fertility treatment — built from lived experience, not sales targets.