Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
How you prepare
By Mayo Clinic staffIntrauterine insemination involves several steps before the actual procedure. First, your partner will provide a semen sample at the doctor's office. Similarly, a donor sperm vial can be thawed and prepared. Because nonsperm elements in semen can cause reactions in the woman's body that interfere with fertilization, the sample will be "washed" in a way that separates the highly active, normal sperm from lower quality sperm and other elements. The likelihood of achieving pregnancy increases by using a small, highly concentrated sample of healthy sperm.
Then, because the timing of IUI is so crucial, your doctor may monitor you for signs of impending ovulation using a transvaginal ultrasound, which is a machine that lets your doctor visualize your ovaries and egg growth. Alternatively, you may be asked to monitor yourself using an at-home urine ovulation predictor kit.
Just before ovulation, your body produces a surge or release of luteinizing hormone (LH). If you're coordinating IUI with your normal cycle, you'll go in for insemination the day after the LH surge. If you're using ovulation-inducing medications, you may be given an injection of human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) to make you ovulate, and then go in for the insemination the next day.
