Vidya Ledsham was still hooked up to an IV in the hospital, recovering from the C-section delivery of her son, when she asked her doctor when she and her husband, Chris, could start planning for a second baby. ?We wanted to have another right away because we wanted kids close in age,? says Ledsham.
When Everett was a year old, they began trying to get pregnant again. ?I thought we could just do the same things that had worked the first time,? she says. (Everett?s conception got a little nudge from a single dose of Clomid, a fertility medication that promotes ovulation.) But over the next five years, they did six cycles of fertility meds, then six cycles of IUI (intrauterine insemination, where a doctor inserts a thin tube through the cervix into the uterus to carry semen directly inside) and finally three cycles of IVF (in vitro fertilization, where the sperm and eggs are extracted, fertilized, and then an embryo is transferred into the uterus). Her first IVF cycle resulted in a pregnancy, but she had a miscarriage. They did two more IVF cycles but never saw a positive pregnancy test. ?We decided to call it quits. We had hit the wall in medical treatments,? she says.
The Ledshams are one of many couples who experience secondary infertility. The definition of secondary infertility is that you?ve been pregnant before but are having trouble getting pregnant again, says Jason Hitkari, a reproductive endocrinologist in Vancouver and president of the Canadian Fertility and Andro...