I don’t know if you do have a ‘conception day’ as such with this process, I mean is it on “Day 0” which is the day they defrosted 9 of my eggs and added the sperm to them? Is it today “Day 4” the day they are going to transfer the growing Embryo(s) back to me? I don’t really know but I’m going with today Wednesday 16 June, 2021. 

As I lie in a freezing cold hospital bed in a very modern fertility clinic in Northern Cyprus alone waiting a long three hours while they prepare my embryos for transfer, I can’t help reflect back on my journey and whatever the outcome (and trust me I am all too aware that there are still an awful lot of pitfalls that may still happen), I am really proud of myself and how far I have come to get to this very moment. 

Mid 2015 just after I turned 40 and decided I should freeze my eggs, I was told by several doctors that I had diminishing ovarian reserve and that I didn’t have any eggs left, it was too late for me to have a biological child using my own eggs. I was give no hope and when I look now at my AMH and the many IVF Facebook groups I am a member of I don’t think I have seen anyone try and use their own eggs with an AMH this low and an FSH as high as mine was, in fact most doctors won’t even start treatment with you if your numbers are as mine were. I was fortunate enough to find a doctor who said he’d give it a go. I like to think he did it for all the right reason (help a single middle age women preserve her fertility etc) and I think he did, but you never really know. Either way he helped me and now here I am six years on, almost reunited with some of my eggs in a completely different country from where we were separated and they were frozen several years ago, it all feels very surreal indeed!  

As I wait to be informed by the embryologist that my embryos are good to go I want to savor this moment and be really proud of myself…. For this is the moment when I still have hope, I am so close to being pregnant and I have hope that I will be when doctors said it wouldn’t happen for me. Maybe it won’t, I don’t know, but I also know that they would also have said that I would never have got this far too, so whatever happens, this moment right now is further than anyone thought I would get, hell it’s probably even further than I, deep down thought I would get, but yet here I am hours away from becoming PUPO (what I now know is IVF talk for “pregnant until proven otherwise”)!, so I’m going to relish that thought and this moment. 

I’m reading a book at the moment called “Option B” it’s about how Sheryl Sandburg had to rewrite her story and her happily ever after because of something unthinkable happened in her life. She had to rewrite her story and go with option B…. This book really resonates with me, not because I had the unthinkable act of having my husband drop dead one day, but because I have had to rewrite my story…. This isn’t how I had imagined “conception day” of my first born would be, I’m not wearing sexy underwear, I’m not with the love of my life, I’m not even having sex!!!!! But hey…. We have a choice, and this is what the book tells you. You can give up, be angry at the world for the situation you find yourself in, live with pain, sorrow and heartbreak, or you can dig deep, learn from this deep sadness and turn to plan b, rewrite YOUR happily ever after. Nobody took that choice away from you, they may have taken a lot of other things, but that choice is still yours…. And so here I am living my “Plan B”, with the most comfy underwear I own, alone and being artificially insemination with an embryo that has my egg and a donor sperm from someone I will never meet…. Plan B is not nearly as romantic as the Plan A in my head was, but it’s where I am and it’s my story and I’m good with it because it has made me so much stronger than I ever thought I would be. The thing I am most proud of from this whole journey is not what I have physically been through, but how I have been able to lean into my Plan B, accept it and make it happen. That is what I am most proud of. 

In a few hours they will tell me of my 9 eggs that were defrosted (from my 19) how many are still growing embryos. I know one didn’t make the defrost and then from the remaining 8 only 4 fertilized, so I know the most that could still be growing is 4 and even that is a long shot because each day there is a high % chance that the “less good” embryos won’t make it. This is based on egg quality and whilst they defrosted 9 of my youngest eggs (the ones they froze first) I was still 40+when I froze them, so if I have two embryos left that I could possibly transfer then I would be happy with that result. 

The next choice I have to make (if I have two embryos) is how many to transfer back to me. They usually do 1, but because of my age I can request 2 and sign a letter that states I accept the risks etc. 

I decided that I would transfer two embryos if there were two embryos to transfer, everything that I have research is that there is just such a small chance of them resulting in a pregnancy at my ‘egg age’ that the chances of me having twins was so slim and so I decided transfer two, if I do get pregnant with twins this is a good problem to have.

Its Game Time

After 3 hours of waiting in this freezing room for game time it finally arrived.  I was given a huge jug of water to drink to fill my bladder, told to put my gown and hairnet on and then I was put in a wheel chair and taken down to the procedure room.  I was taking it all in my stride until this moment, but the moment I was strapped into the operating table things became very real.  

I watched as the doctor transferred two of my growing embryo’s into me via a process he explained was much like having a smear done. There was a ultrasound pushed down on my bladder and uterus so I could see these tiny embryo’s swim towards my uterus lining.  That was it. It took about 1 minute and was a pretty amazing thing to watch.  Now I had to lie down for 1 hour before they would let me leave the clinic pick up my prescription of many medications that I now needed to take over the next two weeks and head back to the hotel.

I was tired when I got back to the hotel.  It had been an emotional and slightly surreal day and they had told me that I needed to take it very easy (no working out and no extreme heat) for the next few weeks. That was going to be hard but I knew I had come such a long way I didn’t want to blow it now.

I flew back to the UAE the next day which was relatively uneventful.  Had to have various PCR tests before departure and upon arrival back in the UAE but thankfully travelled safe and covid free and it was now the 12 day wait until I could take my first pregnancy test.

We all know NOT to google things for answers because sometimes the amount of things you find freak you out more than not knowing what the outcome could be, but of course I had to google and see if there was anything at all I should or could be experiencing that could indicate I was (or wasn’t) pregnant. 

What I found the hardest was that I wasn’t pregnant during this time but wasn’t allowed to do anything, so no drinking, no exercise, no going out in the sun (which in the middle of summer in the UAE is a little difficult to do) but I also couldn’t really tell anyone, so it was a long slow 12 day wait.  Click here to see the schedule of medication I took during this time.

Its finally here, I am on my way.  The last six year journey has led to this very point, I have resigned from my job, I am in the final few months of my notice period and I am sitting at the airport in Istanbul, a little scared and a little excited, heading to my where my frozen eggs are at a clinic in Northern Cyprus. I feel like I am playing a game of poker and I am ‘all in’.  Having absolutely no ability to know or control the outcome, knowing that I could be left in a few months time with no job, no pregnancy and feeling very lost, scared and searching for purpose or I could have my heart filled with joy and be heading closer to motherhood, there is just no knowing at this point. The only thing I do know is that I couldn’t do this next step half in… it had to be all in with the intent of leaving my job, starting a new chapter and in order to do that I had to learn harder into my fear than I have ever had to before, I had to say goodbye to a life that was safe and comfortable and jump with both feet into a new one of twist and turns that may bring me immense pain but may also bring me unimaginable joy. Either way I’m in…. and there is no turning back now.  

As I sit here at the airport waiting for my final flight, there are so many things I thought would be different, I could never have predicted I would be here in a million years.  I would never have thought I would have frozen my eggs, I never would have thought I would have sent them to a clinic in Cyprus, I never would have thought I would be trying to use them with an unknown sperm donor that I purchased for 250 Euro. I never would have thought I would be travelling to a country to use these sperm during a pandemic. There are SO many ‘I never would have thoughts’.  I think that in itself is teaching me something.  It is telling me that no matter how prepared I might want to be, how much control I might want to have about all the possible outcomes, we just can’t predict what will happen in our lives.  The universe has surprise after surprise for us and we can choose to live in fear or embrace that unknown, lean in to it, thrive off it, let it actually fuel us and ride a wave that is surely going to have many ups and downs but I’m starting to see that the ups are worth the downs, the highs are worth the lows and that I would rather live that way than a way of never knowing, a life of mediocrity because I was just too scared to try anything else. 

I find it slightly funny because I am a complete control freak, I make a plan for a plan, I prepare so far in advance that by the time the plan comes into play it needs to be updated because so many variables have changed, but for this part of the journey when I have thought about it over the past few years I thought I would be freaking out, scared, full of anxiety because I didn’t have complete oversight of what the outcome was going to be (I mean how could I), I thought I was really going to struggle with that aspect more than anything else……..but here I am about to get on my last 1 hour flight from Istanbul to Ercan (Northern Cyprus) and I feel a complete sense of calm.  Even as I was packing and a few friends and family members left me messages wishing me luck and telling me how proud they were of me it felt like they were more nervous and had more anxiety about the situation than I did.  I wasn’t phased about going alone, in fact I actually feel that this is something I needed to do alone and I seem to be totally detached with the outcome (at least right now) which is SO unlike me.  Normally I would be playing all the different scenario’s over in my head trying to predict what will happen, trying to say prayers and having anxiety about what will happen if this doesn’t work…. I mean maybe those feelings will come, but right now I feel complete calm. I think I have realized that there are just SO many possible permutations of what might/might not happen.  I might arrive in Cyprus have a scan and blood test and my body might not be ‘good to go’.  They might defrost my eggs or some of them and they might all die, my eggs and donor sperm might make embryos but then after a day or two they may not develop, they might put some embryo’s in me and they might not embed in my uterus and thus no pregnancy, an embryo might attach to my uterus but be chromosomally abnormal thus miscarrying or it might all go well and I might get pregnant…. Just SO many possible possibilities.   I try and not go to any of these outcomes for too long in my head for whilst I want to keep positive, I also want to prepare myself for the worst and just trust in the outcome.  All this being the case, funnily enough I feel that I am exactly where I am supposed to be and that I have done everything I could possibly have done to get to this point.  If things don’t go the way I want them to then I have to trust that having a child this way is/was just not on the cards for me and the universe has a bigger plan.  These are words that are helping me now and god knows I likely may need them to help me over the next few weeks and months, but right now I feel a state of calm knowing that I have tried, I have really tried and done all I can physically, mentally, emotionally to give this the best possible chance of a positive outcome even when doctors told me there was NO chance of a positive outcome.  Other than having a child in my 20s, there really is nothing else I could have done and if I had had a child in my 20s then I wouldn’t be who I am today with all the life changing experiences I have had and crossing paths with all the amazing people I have been so fortunate enough to come across, so I have to have zero regrets about that.  

So as I board my final flight to try and bring this next step of my journey to life and become pregnant using my own eggs and donor sperm, I do so with an open heart doing all I can to not be attached to whatever the outcome of this ‘possible last part of my journey’ to becoming a mum could be.  I’m trusting in the universe and I’m seeing what life has in store….this is all I can do at this point and it strangely feels not as scary as I had imagined it would!