We had a very bad experience with SG. It's an assembly line. We were highly recommended to one RE there, but he turned out to be a major issue. Communciation was awful. We met him 3 times before our transfer and he never seemed to read our file before seeing us, including the day of the transfer. He never remembered anything we told him or even what he had told us. We were told we had 9 good blasts. We showed up on the first transfer day and he said there were 7. We asked what happened to the other 2 and he told us there were only ever 7. We specifically asked to transfer two blasts. We got there the day of the transfer, only one blast was ready. We again insisted that we had discussed two blasts, the nurse even remembered when we had discussed it with her, but the RE did not. We had a long wait as they had to review the notes, then they had to make arrangements to get another blast ready. We finally transferred two. All told, we had 3 transfers that resulted in two miscarriages, one chemical pregnancy and one pair that failed to take. We were left with one risky blast and decided to go to another clinic.

We switched to VCRM in Reston and had an excellent experience. Dr. Sharara asked a lot of questions about our treatment including the results of the autopsy for the two miscarriages. SG never did one. He couldn't understand how a facility could implant blasts that miscarried would not do an autopsy to try and learn what went wrong and whether any adjustment was needed for future transfers. We did a fresh cycle with VCRM and had a viable twin pregnancy mere months from switching clinics. Those children are now 7 years old and we are very fortunate to have had Dr. Sharara's skills in helping us with our family. The donor matching was so good that there is a clear "family resemblance" between one of the twins and Mom. He looks very similar to Mom's brother's child pictures and everyone thinks he looks like his uncle. Since that was one of our criteria for selection, he did an excellent job.

We did SGF with DE + GC. We used agencies to recruit our donor and carrier. SGF did a great job with the medical part. Success on try #1 (single transfer), super smoothly done with out-of-town DE and GC both. Use of DE + GC required that the embryos be frozen prior to transfer.

On the other hand, our SGF experience prior to all of that wasn't great. Who you get as your nurse makes a huge difference.

I did both SG and RBA and RBA was so much better.

Ditto on the Shady Grove. A proud parent of an elementary age child.