What is Ovum Pickup in IVF?

You can jump on :

1. Overview
2. Important things

Dr. Jay Mehta is a Gynecologist, Obstetrician & Infertility Specialist in Shree IVF Clinic, Mumbai. With his help, you will get to know about Egg Collection, which is Step 3 in the IVF treatment procedure.

When the woman is given the last injection, which we call Trigger, the time of egg collection comes between 36-38 hours, which doctors call Ovum Pickup or Egg Pickup in medical language. The interpretation of ovum pickup is quite simple, where ovum means egg and pickup means to take out from the body.

Whenever a patient is considering going for an IVF treatment, there are various queries in their mind, for example, how will the egg come out of the body because they know that ovary is situated inside the body and they are getting injections on their arm or abdomen. Another question that strikes the mind of the patients is that whether the procedure is safe or is it painful, and many more.

There is a set time of 36-38 hours after trigger injection for Ovum pickup. Before doing egg pickup, it is very important to know that it is an anesthesia-based process. In some clinics, patients are given general anesthesia to make the patient fall asleep completely, while in some the patients are given local anesthesia with sedation and this procedure is done. Both techniques are quite safe.

With the help of internal sonography, the doctor detects the size and location of the egg. Further, with the guidance of this procedure, a biopsy guard is placed, and using a needle the eggs are accessed from the vagina under the assistance of negative suction. There is a machine which assists in this pickup process. But it is very important to understand temperature control. Hence, you need to thoroughly understand the complete procedure in which your normal body temperature (37˚ C) is a consideration.

After egg pickup, patients usually wake up after 15 to 20 minutes, and the patient is discharged in one to two hours. After this procedure, the patients do not need to rest on the bed.

Important things to keep in mind after the Egg Pickup procedure:

Patients should understand that they may feel slight pain for 2-3 days in the abdomen after the egg pickup procedure because it is a hyper-stimulated ovary, and in IVF, doctors try to replace an egg with as many eggs as possible in the body. So it is justified that the size of the ovary will be large, so when it tries to come back to normal, then the patient may feel slight pain.

Rarely, the patient may have a slight hyper-reaction and there may be a feeling of bloating and shortness of breath, but this happens to 1 patient in 1000. As this procedure is safe and is performed under sterile precaution, no antibiotics or painkillers are given after this procedure.

After the egg pickup procedure is done, it is brought to the laboratory of IVF, where there are further procedures.