What would you do with $100,000? Some people would use it for the down payment of a ï¬ve-room flat, pay for a car or ï¬nance a university education.

For 36-year-old Audrey Nah, it was the price she paid in her arduous attempts to get pregnant.

While her peers had no problems making babies, the oil broker had to go through a total of six in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) cycles. She eventually managed to conceive and carry through two successful pregnancies from her second and last cycle.

"I was then 27 years old and never thought I'd have problems conceiving. I remember we started trying for a baby around the same time as another couple. Within four months, they had a bun in the oven. But, for us, nothing happened - even after a year," says Audrey, who was diagnosed with unexplained infertility, which forms about 20 per cent of all infertility cases.

When traditional Chinese medicine and intrauterine insemination failed to help her conceive, Audrey turned to IVF. By then, three precious years had gone by.

For the next few years, Audrey says she became a "pin cushion" from the numerous jabs she gave herself to stimulate ovulation as part of the IVF procedure. She was so determined to have children that she would even bring along her daily injections of follicle stimulating hormone in an ice bag on her overseas trips.

The pain from the injections was nothing, says Audrey. Instead, the toughest part of her IVF journey was the waiting.

"Every day, you're waiting for news like whether you've got a good number of (ovarian) follicles going or whether the embryos are healthy. There are a lot of heartaches and emotional highs and lows," she says.

"I think I spent half of my waking hours at the doctor's waiting. Nothing was as torturous as waiting for calls from the embryologist."