IVF

Siobhan's gorgeous girls!

 Today I welcome Siobhan to my blog to discuss her experience with IVF. As you can see from the above photo, Siobhan is the mum to two beautiful girls. I really respect and admire Siobhan; she's one of the kindest people you will ever meet. I'm so happy that she has been given the opportunity to be a mum!

Take it away Siobhan.

So you marry your best friend and then having children - a mini you - are just part of the course that your relationship will take – unfortunately it is not that easy for some.

I married my best friend and after three years we decided to throw away the contraception and let nature take its course – no stress! After 6 months nothing happened and our friends were starting to fall pregnant but we were getting worried. After a year we started to get serious, having sex at the right time, using ovulation kits, etc – but after another six months nothing. It started to cause tension so we backed away and got back to having a “normal life”, as having a baby started to take over our thoughts every day.

After three years of actively trying and spending ages Googling to find out all the tips we headed off to the GP for hubby to get a referral to make sure he was ok, of course he came back fine – so I had the issue! So we headed off to a fertility clinic, I could not believe that I was there and that having a baby, which should be a natural part of a couple’s relationship was about to get clinical.  We undertook medicals, blood tests, counselling (to see if we would be good parents – normal couples don’t have to do this!) and then I had to go for surgery! It was after surgery that I found out I had really bad endometriosis and cysts and we could never fall pregnant naturally. Our world fell apart as we had to talk about what would happen if we never had children and it was just going to be the two of us in this family? We decided to give IVF a go – dipped into our savings.

IVF is invasive, clinical, not romantic and way too many people get involved. I injected daily, had blood tests daily and ultrasounds daily to make sure that I was ready to have my eggs taken. When I was ready off to the clinic to have eggs removed and then they were inseminated and voila we had embryos – 17 of them!

Our first attempt to get the embryo to implant failed, but the second time it took!! We were pregnant and nothing can beat hearing and seeing a heart beat at 8 weeks. We had managed to get the through it – the emotion, disappointment, the hundreds of doctors’ appointments and having family and friends not quite understand the issues.

Our gorgeous baby girl was born and we were nearly complete!

Three and a half years later and 4 embryos remaining (many of the initial 17 failed to survive) we decided to go again and “use up” what we had – this time it took all four embryos and we again were successful with our lucky last one!

We are now a complete family – one that has taken many years of heartache to achieve. We of course are the lucky ones, IVF worked for us, for many couples out there it won’t and they will continue the heartache.

SG x