Let’s be honest and put things straight from the start… 2020 sucks! I know I should not use this word, but can you possibly find a better one? This pandemic has affected me strongly. Both personally and professionally. It stopped me being able to help my patients in the way I would have liked. It changed the approach to the problem and I had to find alternatives to play around...

“How are yoooouuuu?” This is the most loaded question anyone can ask right now and for some reason there is an emphasis on the word YOU each time. If your answer doesn’t include the word “complicated“… in some vein you are not in my tribe! The timeline of this pandemic feels like it is now in dog years with each second multiplied by seven. We were out the other day and usual pleasantries...

Failure after IVF can be devastating for many couple. A cycle of IVF requires work, effort, money and most of all… generate hope. Hope for success that results in having a healthy beautiful baby in your arms. So, when IVF fails, it raises the question of why? Why did not work with me? What I did wrong? Sometimes there will be a clear reason but often there is no direct answer. And this...

The month of October is Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month. This provides an opportunity to educate the public on such sensitive topics as miscarriage, pregnancy loss, stillbirth, sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and the death of a newborn. It also acknowledges those who have endured such a loss to let them know they are not alone. How it is honored globally Globally, the fifteenth...

Where has the time gone?! It’s hard to believe that it has been 4 months since we sat here at our virtual table! It was the beginning of COVID and I think we can all agree that none of us could have been prepared for what was to come. Here in Barbados we fell in line like soldiers and followed the government’s mandates to flatten the curve. Was it easy? No. Did it work? Yes.  Barbados was...

As we get ready to return to international patients coming to Barbados for IVF treatment, we have put in place some changes to ensure the safety for the patients and staff:Limitation of the number of persons simultaneously present in the centre with our waiting room seating area spaced for social distancing.  The three waiting rooms will be utilized to minimize patient to patient contact....

Father’s Day is here again and June is Men’s Health Month, so I want to share my knowledge about male infertility and help you to not only cope with it but also fight it!

It was almost two weeks ago – I sat on a beach, the warm blanket of sand underneath me and the tears started to roll. Life was changing so quickly and I felt like I could not keep up. Sitting under the tree, I picked up a handful of sand and watched the grains cascade through my fingers. I didn’t try to stop them, instead I was mesmerized by the flow and natural pull of gravity. The natural...

The dictionary defines the word pivot as “the central point, pin, or shaft on which a mechanism turns or oscillates”. However with the recent tragic passing of Kobe Bryant, the reference to basketball seemed a bit more appropriate to the direction my thoughts were going in this month. In basketball this term is used to define both the act of keeping one foot in place while moving the other and...

You may be surprised to learn that quite a lot of our patients come to Barbados with their parents for treatment. Recently we sat down with David Turcot (one of Jasper, Canada’s favourite sons) to discuss a parents view of the island of Barbados, fertility treatment abroad and supporting his daughter Katrina going through this process. Listen to the Podcast here:...

It’s 2020 and we are kicking off a New Year and a new decade! This is a time where people normally set their goals and resolutions. Personally I love doing this but it also can come with a sense of anxiety and pressure that we need to establish these fundamentals. Instead today I want us to do something a little bit different. Today, I invite you to please grab a chair and join me here at my...

Before we can talk about the mosaic embryo, we must understand more about genetics and embryos… Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, 22 chromosomes labelled 1-22 in descending order of size and a pair of sometimes matched (XX) in women and sometimes mismatched (XY) in man, sex chromosomes. In general, when an embryo becomes an embryo, it has a perfectly matched set of 23 chromosome pairs...