Serene Srouji

It is very important to understand upfront that the doctors work as a team at BWH, which means the doctor you see primarily and discuss your treatment with is NOT the one making decisions as you go through your cycle, and will most likely not be the one doing your egg retrieval, transfer, HSG testing, uterus mapping, etc. I did not realize this until after my second cycle, which would have explained so much if I had known. As such, it's kind of hard to rate any doctor on their medical decisions. I had a very mixed experience with Dr. Srouji. At times she seemed to be on our side, at others she almost seemed mad at us. I was probably not the typical patient-- I didn't go in assuming we would be doing IVF--and that seemed to frustrate her. At age 39 I was sort of clueless about the fertility process and just went because my regular doctor told me to "get checked out" after six months of trying to conceive. The assumption, however, was that you are there to sign up for IVF no matter what, and she seemed really confused about how to handle the fact that I didn't know if I was willing to go that far. She waffled on a few things-- at first she said male factor was such an issue nothing short of ICIS would work, then after my husband had a second test she said it was in the normal range and trying IUI first sounded like a great plan, then when the sperm count was low with the IUI she was almost angry with me and said the sperm count was always low and she only supported trying IUI because she knew I didn't want IVF. One of my biggest complaints is that she really didn't address--or seem to understand--my underlying medical concerns--I have been dealing with PCOS/PMDD/general endocrine issues and rough periods my whole life and wasn't sure how medications would affect me. I did have some REALLY bad side effects from both Clomid and the IVF meds that she neither warned me about, nor seemed to care about when I reported them. I think some mistakes were made during my second cycle but I will never know for sure because she abruptly dropped me as a patient. I don't know if it was Dr. Srouji's fault per se, but overall I would characterize working with BWH as traumatizing.

If you are not too interested in the details or any sort of individualized care, this might be a better experience (I felt that way at first until things started getting complicated and confusing and I seemed to have more questions the more I learned). It might also be better if you are an IVF veteran and already know the basics.

At 39 and 1/2, my AMH was 2.0 and FSH was something like 5.5, but my husband's sperm count and motility was low. So low, in fact, she said nothing short of ICIS would work (long story, but we did try IUI with Clomid first). My first IVF was lower dose antagonist (gonal-f, cetrotide, HCG trigger). Afterward she said my egg maturity rate (6/11) and my estrogen on trigger day (525) were much lower than she'd expect with my numbers so we had to go to an aggressive lupron microflare cycle (lupron, menapur, gonal-f, HCG trigger). My estrogen was MUCH higher (3260), and I had 14 follicles on trigger day, but only 8 eggs were retrieved and only one embryo was frozen on day 1. The embryo had to be frozen because my progesterone was extremely high during stimulation. She said I clearly have "an egg problem" but dropped me as a patient at the same time, so I don't have anymore information than that to work with going forward.

Monitoring is very early in the morning, and they seem to require more monitoring appointments per cycle than a lot of places. It's ok once you get used to it but at the beginning it was super stressful. Leave PLENTY of time in the morning for Boston traffic, parking, etc. The ultrasound and lab techs are very nice.

It's MA and I have BCBS, so I only paid 10% plus copays for medications (~$200).

BWH uses an algorithm to determine the number of embryos to transfer-- you can choose to have fewer transferred but not more than they recommend.

Dr. Srouji was a caring, friendly doctor. She took the time to explain the surrogacy process and answer any questions that I had brought with me. She was genuinely excited by our success and wanted to be updated when our daughter was born. She is very busy so there were times that communication as slow, but I understand that just as I am given the time and effort, so are her other patients.

Be patient with the wait times in between appointments/phone calls. Brigham is a busy clinic!

Dr. Srouji created a very specific IVF plan based on my medical issues, and monitored me very carefully, explaining her decisions along the way. We did a very low dose of hormone stimulation with constant US and blood tests to check levels along the way. Our cycle was effective and produced several viable eggs for transfer.

I did all of my monitoring appointments at the local clinic, it was very convenient and wait times were minimal, staff was very helpful.

The total cost for the clinic and hormone meds for our GC was around $10,000

As noted earlier, Dr. Srouji was incredibly caring and dedicated to helping us achieve success. She called us to check in, tracked my response and made adjustments, and was a clear communicator through every step of the process. I am so thankful for her kind and supportive care. She did some out-of-the-box thinking regarding why our embryos weren't making it to day 5 despite the high number we had. After switching two day 3 transfer with assisted hatching, we had two successful cycles, the first ending in miscarriage due to chromosomal abnormality (we didn't do genetic testing) and the second resulting in my current pregnancy.

Ask lots of questions. It's an overwhelming process and she is there to help you make sure you have the information you need to move forward in the process. And call her nurse Sandy--she is amazing and was a great help to us as well.

We used ICSI because my husband had sperm morphology issues. My PCOS meant lots of eggs of not so great quality, so we switched to a Lupron protocol which helped. We also found that our embryos weren't converting from day 3 to 5 so we switched to day 3 transfer w assisted hatching.

Massachusetts has unbelievable coverage for fertility. We paid nothing out of pocket, maybe a total of $100 in copays for our insurance.

I was happy to be working with Serene since she was part of the Brigham and Women's team and she also had other doctors that she could consult when she wanted to bounce something off another doctor. During our meetings she was present there for us to discuss our options. We went through 5 IVF cycles with her and the last 2 were donor egg. Our first donor cycle went terribly wrong and she had felt bad. Knowing this she wanted to lay out our options and went above and beyond if we opted to do a 5th cycle in which we did. She was very surprised by the results of our 1st donor cycle that being worse than my cycles. When we opted for the 5th and final try she even worked with us to secure a donor. The only thing that I wish is when we had a failure she was the one who reached out and not to hear it from the nurses. While we always met with her during our appointments we never spoke with her during the tests and results always came from the nurses. We would then meet with her but it was often a few weeks after we had received the news.

She is busy and you will see her for your appointments but most of your communication will be with the nurses. Also she is only in Foxboro once a week so it limited the times that she could make an appointment if you wanted to see her there verses Boston.

This process was so easy and they had time set aside in the morning where we could come in. Super easy and did not add stress to an already stressful process.

We are lucky to live in MA where fertility treatment is covered through our insurance so other than medication co-pays we did not have much in terms of costs for the IVF procedures. Our expenses came in with the egg donor process and that can be costly.

We did multiple embryo transfers since I was older and the quality of my eggs/embryos. She also tried icsi where they place a small pin hole in the embryo increasing the chances that it would take.

Overall, very good experience. She came off as very smart, but also caring. She was honest with us about the success rates. Downsides were that we saw two other doctors for the retrieval and the implantation, and didn't see her again since we got pregnant on the first try.

Come in with questions as it is often hard to think of them in the moment

Very minimal because the procedure was covered in MA

Because they were day 3 transfers, they recommended putting in two embryos. They told us we had an 8% chance of twins... we had twins

Expect her to be frank and thorough.

Morning monitoring was efficient. I never had any issues.

Medications were $3000; IVF cycle was about $12,000.

I felt that she really cared about my health and positive outcome. I feel like she didn't fully look over my medical records and procedures I had done before I went to see her.

She's a great doctor and surgeon. I just feel that Boston IVF has a better lab.

I wish they had it available all times of day but it was understandably only early in the morning.