Overcoming Fertility Challenges with BILH Pharmacy

BILH Pharmacy’s Role in One Family’s IVF Journey

When Lauren Palmer, interim vice president of strategy and business development at Beth Israel Lahey Health (BILH) Pharmacy, and her husband first learned they were going to have a baby, they were elated.

“It was like winning the lottery,” she recalls. “We were over the moon just knowing it could happen.”

After years of trying naturally and several rounds of in-vitro fertilization, it seemed fitting that the miracle news arrived on Christmas Eve. They were with family amid the hubbub of the holiday, and the joy of finally becoming parents was surreal.

None of this would have been possible without BILH Pharmacy.

Support When It Mattered Most

Lauren and her husband always knew they wanted to start a family, but after three years without success, their prospects looked dim.

“It just wasn’t happening for us,” Palmer says. “So we decided to seek out a fertility specialist.”

The particulars of in-vitro fertilization, or IVF, are straightforward: Doctors extract eggs from a woman’s ovaries and inseminate them in a laboratory. Fertilized eggs are then returned to the mother’s womb to develop naturally.

What many people don’t realize, though, is that patients must take a whole host of medications at each stage of the process, meaning their relationship with their pharmacy is vital to the treatment’s success.

From the beginning, Palmer knew she would turn to her colleagues at BILH Pharmacy.

“I knew I could trust the team here to take care of me and anything else I needed,” she says. “I always felt like I had a partner here.”

Trusting the Experts

For many patients, the prescription side of IVF is the most stressful part. Medications are expensive, and given the number of them patients need to take, it can quickly become a burden.

Palmer, however, never felt that stress with BILH Pharmacy.

“My meds were always ready to go for me in a cooler, perfectly set up for me to take home,” she says. “It was always the easy piece.”

Even when there were hiccups, the BILH Pharmacy team stepped up.

Late one afternoon, for example, Palmer got a call saying recent lab results were too high. She needed to quadruple her dosage or else the treatment cycle risked failure. When Palmer checked her fridge and realized she didn’t have enough medication, she knew a missed dose – and a failed cycle – were possible.

She called BILH Pharmacy right away.

“They were wrapping up for the day and getting stuff ready for Monday,” she recalls. Despite the time crunch, “they told us, ‘Don’t worry about it. We’ll have it.’” She hopped in her car and drove the half-hour to the pharmacy. When she arrived, her pharmacist was waiting with the medications in hand.

For Palmer, this not only validated her trust in BILH Pharmacy, it also reinforced her commitment to her job when she went back to work.

“If I didn’t truly believe in the service it’d be really hard for me to go out and sell it to others,” she notes. “So I’m grateful I can stand by the services we provide.”

Lauren’s daughter is now a happy baby of 17 months – so happy, in fact, that her nickname at school is simply ‘Happy.’

“We are so grateful to have her and to have the chance to be parents,” she says. “We try really hard not to take it for granted.”