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LISA LOFTON: My name is Lisa Lofton. I'm an IVF coordinator for the Fertility Institute, Mandeville office. I've been a registered nurse for, since 1991 and employed by the Fertility Institute for 15 years. For the past 13 years I worked in the capacity as IVF coordinator getting patients ready for their IVF cycle. As a patient comes in as a new patient, physicians will tell me, you know, to go in for an IVF consult, if that's where the patient is going to need. And I'll go in, go through the IVF cycle, what they can expect before, during and after. Go through the cost, which is a major issue with a lot of patients. And after that, when the patient's ready, they will give me a call. We get started with the medications. I go through the medications, get them ready for the injections, teach them to give themselves, administer themselves injections. Husbands are also taught in case that's going to be the person to administer them. We try to keep things as low stress and as organized as possible for the patient. It's a very stressful time in their life so we try to minimize their stress as much as possible.

Once they're ready for the egg retrieval and embryo transfer, I preop them in the office and send them over to preadmit in the hospital. During their IVF cycle they're in for very frequent office visits, ultrasounds and labs. The last step in that IVF cycle would be setting up their pregnancy test, which they do do in the office. And that probably is the most rewarding part of my job, being able to go in and tell a couple that you've been working for for six weeks or so that they're pregnant and going to have a baby after they waited for many years to hear those words. Just seeing the looks on their faces is just amazing to me.