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Wellness Wednesday for July 30, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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I'm sorry. That is not an easy position to be in. Your wife might know all the things that a shrink or gynecologist might say, but they seem hollow or unhelpful when you try to apply them to yourself.

If I can say something somewhat hopeful, what basis do you have to claim 30% odds of there being a genetic abnormality? You frame it as one that's present in either your or or partner, as fetuses can get them de novo even if the parents are alright.

It's been a while since I brushed up on my chromosomes, but my understanding is that only ~5% of couples experiencing repeated miscarriages have an underlying chromosomal problem. I presume those are balanced reciprocal translocations, Robertsonian ones and so on.

Have you guys been karyotyped? Did one of the doctors specifically relay this to you, or is this something you've been trying to figure out yourself? Ask your wife for more details, I expect they've been giving her a far more detailed debrief than you've received, or at least she understood more of it by virtue of medical training.

In the absence of more information, I'd be very averse to ascribing your difficulties to such. Even if that's the case, there's reason to hope that IVF would help! Something like PGT-SR would help identify viable embryos that have dodged the bullet. IVF is expensive, but I expect the two of you can afford it. I wish you guys well, and hopefully you come out of this with the happy family you deserve.