In IVF, how specifically are a woman's eggs collected?

Question

I've heard of women that have had 2 eggs collected, and women who have had 22 eggs collected... why such a difference? How do they collect the eggs in the first place?

Answer 1

after going through a retrieval in december, your eggs are retrieved vaginally (while you are in a twilight sleep) and they are aspirated through a tube like needle the needle pierces each ovary and by ultrasound, they aspirate as many eggs that are of a certain minimum size-- they got 15 from me and 5 from the lady next to me in recovery, you have a bit of light cramping for the remainder of the day but they gave me tylenol 3--yea! it really was not painful at all...hope this helped

Answer 2

Not being female and therfor never having had the procedure done I had to look it up. Anyway, according to WikiPedia:

"The eggs are retrieved from the patient using a transvaginal technique involving an ultrasound-guided needle piercing the vaginal wall to reach the ovaries. Through this needle follicles can be aspirated, and the follicular fluid is handed to the IVF laboratory to identify ova. The retrieval procedure takes about 20 minutes and is usually done under conscious sedation or general anaesthesia."

It probably sounds worse than it is, though that's just a guess. I would think if it was a really horrible thing to go through that nobody would actually ever do it.

As for the difference in the eggs I assume that it's just so that they're sure they have a good number to fertilize so that you only have to have this done once.

If the man's sperm and the woman's eggs are viable to begin with and they're having trouble conceiving for an undetermined reason they'll likely harvest only a couple eggs. If the man has a low sperm count or just poor sperm entirely then they'll harvest more eggs so that the sperm they do have to work with is certain to have an egg to fertilize. That's a guess on my part so don't take it too literally as I'm not an M.D. ;)

See the link below for some more info on how things are done.

Answer 3

What the guy above said is just right. It really isn't as bad as it sounds. The woman will be taking a series of medications leading up to the retrieval. The actual retrieval is a very quick process.