IVF Basics
Understanding IVF: A Step-by-Step Guide
What actually happens during an IVF cycle, from ovarian stimulation to embryo transfer.
In vitro fertilisation (IVF) can sound overwhelming from the outside, but it's really a sequence of well-understood steps, each with a clear medical purpose. Here's what the process actually looks like from start to finish.
What we help you with:
- Ovarian stimulation: daily hormone injections encourage your ovaries to develop multiple mature eggs instead of the single egg a natural cycle produces, with regular blood tests and ultrasounds to track progress.
- Egg retrieval: a short, sedated procedure to collect the mature eggs directly from the ovaries, timed precisely around a trigger injection.
- Fertilisation: eggs are combined with sperm in the lab (conventional IVF) or a single sperm is injected directly into each egg (ICSI), depending on what your case needs.
- Embryo culture and transfer: fertilised eggs are monitored as they develop over several days before the best embryo is selected for transfer into the uterus, either fresh or in a later frozen cycle.
Every patient's protocol is adjusted to their own hormone levels and response — this is the general shape of the journey, and your care team will walk you through exactly how your own cycle is expected to unfold.