Water main break at the Brigham impacts IVF services

A water main break at Brigham and Women’s Hospital on Christmas Eve has disrupted in vitro fertilization services for upward of 300 people, forcing patients to reschedule or move egg retrievals and embryo transfers. According to a hospital spokesperson, the break occurred at 1 a.m. during a repair on the hospital’s 8th floor. Within 30 minutes, Brigham engineering teams and the Boston Fire Department had identified the source of the leak and turned off the water. However, the flood damaged the walls of several areas of the hospital, including the IVF clinic, making frozen embryos stored in the area inaccessible as crews work to do remediation work. In a statement posted on Instagram on Dec. 28, the hospital said that all embryos and eggs remained safe in continuously monitored cryo-tanks. But the storage tanks won’t be opened for about a month, after construction is over and the air and environment has been tested for safety, the hospital said. Patients undergoing a frozen embryo transfer will have to wait weeks to reschedule and redo the extensive process of preparing their bodies for a pregnancy. Not only does the preparation involve medication that can cause nausea and irritability, but also frequent doctor visits, blood work, and transvaginal ultrasounds. Patients undergoing egg retrieval, or who are doing “fresh transfers” with eggs that have not been frozen, have been able to move forward with procedures at an alternative site run by fertility clinic Boston IVF. It’s the second time in a decade that the IVF clinic has flooded. A waterline burst in 2014, destroying many documents and prompting an emergency backup plan with Boston IVF.