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Hi FaithLoveHope (FLH)!
I have just complete a cycle with iVIG. It's horribly expensive at $10,000 a month! The blood test itself to see if you need this blood transfusion is $1500! And you have to have the iVIG transfusion every month to keep the pregnancy going until you are in your third trimester, turns out. They couple it with Lovenox (70 mgs daily) as well as Prednisone (20 mg daily) to combat all NK cell activity as well.
This last miscarriage is my 5th, all of which I have lost right at 5.5 weeks. I think that's when the heart starts pumping. But, back to iVIG, I know that it does help because this last cycle is the healthiest my HcG numbers have ever been as well as the actual farthest we actually got (right at 6 weeks). I spontaneously miscarried with a gush of blood, so something was up with the embryo, I think. Maybe it was a dud. Who knows. All my other ones weren't miscarriages in the sense that my body rejected them; they just grew to a certain point and then stopped.
The only thing that's controversial with iVIG is that half the studies say one thing, half the studies say another. If you ask an RE who "doesn't believe" in the hooplah regarding iVIG, he'll tell you the statistics are poor and inconclusive. If you ask an RE who does believe in it, he'll tell you that it has helped 75% of the cases where all hope was lost. But know one thing: there is NO HARM in getting iVIG. It's totally safe. They come to your home, stick a portable IV in you, and you're free to work, walk about, play in your home for the next four hours while they monitor your blood pressure and vitals. The moment they take it out of you, you are free to do anything you want. It's just clean plasma. It was described to me as this: "Think of your autoimmune system as if it's in Iraq, constantly fighting forces, constantly at enemy lines, day in and day out. Well, iVIG is like a fresh backup enforcement flown in from Hawaii, where they have been previously spending hours on the beach laying in the sun, and they tap your tired autoimmune system on the shoulder and say, 'Hey, go sit under the shade tree for a little while and catch your breath; were here to do the work for you while you rest." So, your autoimmune system, then, goes a bit dormant and rests, doesn't work so hard, while the fresh iVIG autoimmunities go to work battling anything that needs to be battled... just not the baby or anything unnecessary like your autoimmune system was over-doing. It just lets it rest and not work so hard to kill everything in sight.
In our case, I think we have a bad batch of embryos that we are plowing through: we started with 12, transferred 2 and froze the rest, and each one has great starting HcG levels, but they either don't double right or they don't keep doubling through week 5. This last cycle they did double nicely up to around 9,100... then something *poof* happened which leads people to believe it was a bad embryo, not my body miscarrying for no good reason. We've gone through 6, have 6 to do.
Hope that helps! Good luck to you!
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