IVF, fertility preservation and other paths to parenthood

And when the results came back in she said, “This is the situation, I don’t think that we will actually get an egg from you but if we do it will be your biological age” which at that point was I think 37. So she said, “We can offer you one chance at IVF but you need to do it immediately. You can’t wait until a more convenient time or whatever because your hormone levels are so concerning that yeah it won’t be viable for us to offer you again in a few months’ time.”

I did try immediately. She was really shocked. We managed to actually get three eggs. They all fertilised and I ended up having three separate embryo transfers. The first one didn’t work at all. The second one resulted in a short pregnancy with very strong pregnancy symptoms for a short time.

Did they give you a sense before you started about the likelihood of it working?

Yeah. It was pretty low. It was a less than five per cent chance. I don’t think they actually give you lower statistics than that. But yeah I knew that having children was the only thing I’d ever really wanted in life and so I knew that I had to jump in with both feet and give it everything I had so that I could walk away knowing that I’d left no stone unturned. You know, I had done everything that I possibly humanly could.

I do definitely remember that joy of carrying around that little secret that I know something that the world doesn’t know [laughing]. And yeah then to lose it was pretty awful and then I had to wait a month and then ended up having to have a D&C but then I actually miscarried it – if you call it that – the night before the scheduled D&C but they still went ahead with it and did tests and stuff as well just to make sure everything had gone. And that was a really horrific and very lonely, very scary night while that was happening.

It had taken me nearly six months to actually go back for the final one after the miscarriage because it was just… I found that so hard to process because my hopes had just skyrocketed and then to come down with such a thud was like ‘I don’t know how I will cope if this happens again.’ So yeah it took a number of months to just process that and then yeah the last one I was ready to jump in again wholeheartedly. I had the statistic still in my head but I was still really full of hope that, you know, ‘Well why wouldn’t it work?

I’ve got this far,’ and you don’t hear, at least I don’t hear, of the failed IVF. Everybody has a good luck story. You hear particularly in the media about people that have these babies when they’re well past the fertility age. You have people that are – I know that success with IVF is a much lower rate than the fails with IVF. But you just don’t hear about the people that it doesn’t work out for. And so that also was very hard to try to process when I got to the end of it that ‘Well I’ve given it my best shot and it still hasn’t been enough.’ And so there was that another layer of my body has failed me. It’s not good enough. It’s dysfunctional. It’s not working.

Of course sometimes I feel a bit bad. I think especially on the coast it seems that everybody has lots of kids. [laughing] So we go to the beach and then we see lots of families with two, four kids. So sometimes I look and I think then, ‘maybe I will not have a kid who looks like me, but I am really opened for the idea of adoption.’ If one day I am married and I start to think about have kids probably. So on the beginning I thought the only option I could accept was the egg donation. But nowadays I don’t know if I want to put my body in this kind of stress because I know it’s lots of hormones and exams and everything. So I don’t want to do this anymore. [laughing]

And the idea of adoption for me is… it’s really nice because if I cannot have a kid, I know kids that don’t have parents or I could help someone, someone help me at same time so, yeah… [laughing].

We don’t know where you’re going to end up living but is adoption sort of easy in [country]?

I don’t know. I cannot say easy because it take a long time. It has many steps that you need to pass. So I heard some families take three, five years to adopt a kid. So it’s kind of complicated. It’s long. It’s really long.

The reason why it sort of took three months for the surgery to happen was they tried to allow a period for me to have some eggs preserved. And so I did two cycles of IVF. Yes. That was, I would say, probably the most difficult part of the whole process. That was when I realised that I was not going to be a mum. Yeah. Like, a natural mum I mean. Yeah. That was the most.

And I don’t think it helps when you’re packed full of all the different hormones that they put in to try and make you do your thing that they want you to do or that need to happen for you to be able to have eggs preserved. You can’t make good decisions at that stage. And that’s what you’re expected to do is make decisions that impact your life.

It was definitely presented as an option, but it was presented as an option they would prefer I didn’t take.

Because they wanted to give you the cancer treatment quickly?

Yeah. They felt that it was an increasing risk to let it sit for the period of time required and it was sort of six weeks; it was an additional six weeks. So they felt that it was too high risk to leave it for another six weeks.

They said, “Well, we might save, you know, if we could save ovarian tissue…”, then I would have been able to have my children at some other stage in another woman’s body. But it was pretty cruel that just as I was beginning that process, I not only lost one ovary, I lost the entire reproductive system. So it was very cruel and I think I’ll probably still deal with the grief of that for the rest of my life I think, yeah. I have sort of said before that I’m comforted at times of my loss and grief that I was trying to achieve that goal and that does bring me comfort.

However, the IVF people are really cool. So if anyone is going through early menopause, go to an IVF clinic. They are unbelievable because they’re not scared of anything.

To me, it’s just like crazy what they can do with IVF and I’m shocked and I’m thinking, “How can you conceive children like this?” But they do it every day. So when I went in with my cancer information that I would have no remaining things, the IVF specialist was unbelievable and she was an oncologist one, so a cancer – it’s called a fertility preservation person that you see. And she just said, “Okay. What have we got? What have we got to work with? Have you got siblings? Have you got blah-blah-blah, sister, brother?” and I have a younger sister who is also carrying my genetic material and a brother who’s carrying my, you know, DNA as well. So she was like, “Right. We have so many options.” She was like, “You can…” because I’m bisexual as well so if I found a female partner, we could use my brother’s semen which would represent my genetics and carry on my family line with my partner. Or I could use a surrogate and get my sister’s eggs donated and then my friend, my male friend that I was already going to do it with and to me, my mind was blown. But this lovely woman was just like, “Yeah. Yeah. Do-able. Do-able. Do-able.” The options they have are so, so cool and she explained to me that just because I have a child with my eggs doesn’t mean that they’re going to be musical or sporty or whatever. She said that if you use your brother’s or sister’s, the chances are just so random with genetics that you’ll still see a lot of things that you want. So that’s pretty cool and she was rapt as well with options. They’re really good at giving you possibilities at those places, yeah.

So shortly after I was diagnosed with breast cancer and the nurses sort of gave me a checklist of things, or people I needed to see, and included in there was a fertility specialist. And I said, having children wasn’t really something that I seriously considered and can we just skip that. I just wanted to move along.

My concern was just getting through the whole cancer treatment and they said, “Ah, no, this is part of protocol so you have to go.” I said, “Okay, reluctantly I will go,” and then when I went, but I thought, it was really just going to be this conversation centred about all that and the fertility specialist start talking to me about, yeah, the fertility options. And then she also kind of said, “Have they told you about chemotherapy and the impact that does to your ovaries and the whole menstrual cycle and things like?” I said yes, and we briefly talked about. And so she said, “Oh, happy to still see you after that if you have any other questions.” I said, “Okay, that’s a great thing.”

And so I walked away and then I emailed her back and told her, “I have decided that no, the fertility preservation’s not for me, but I’m still keen to take up your suggestion of coming back to see you after chemotherapy and talking about any other effects that, you know, that are bothering me.”

The other option that was given by the fertility specialist at the time, was to have part of my ovary removed and cryo-reserved. Ovarian tissue preservation, it’s called. There was no scientific evidence to back its validity, in Australia. Other babies had been born around the world. About 70 babies around the world, but they’d had no success in Australia whatsoever. I don’t remember the actual thing that made me go ahead with it. More just thinking, ‘I need to feel like I’ve done everything I possibly can.’ Laparoscopically, one day, I went to [city]. They removed a third of my right ovary, cut into 99 slices, the piece of paper said, and put it in the freezer. So, I don’t think anything about that. So having gone through menopause, we knew our only hope of having children of our own biologically, my husband and I was through this tissue process.

They said I needed to wait probably around four or five years, before I thought of doing anything, to make sure that the cancer didn’t come back, and to give my body some time to recover and so we went and saw the fertility specialist and spoke to her about what we would need to do and the first thing was, “Come off your HRT, to see if you’ve had any spontaneous ovarian resurrection of ovarian function,” which, I wasn’t that keen on, because I knew what it felt like not to be on HRT. And, I felt like, ‘Haven’t I been there and done this already? Do I have to do this process?’

But, anyway, so I did that. And it was probably six or eight weeks, went off the HRT, had the blood tests had an internal scan and just as I thought, there was no function! I was hot and grumpy, and not surprised at all. So, back to the fertility specialist, who said that the tests showed that I was a candidate to have the tissue grafted into me but that would take quite a team of people to get together. So, there was people who had specialised area in defrosting the tissue; in grafting and sewing the tissue; some scientists, bits and pieces. There was quite a number of people they sort of had to get together, in one room.

So, it took three months for them to be able to set a date for the surgery laparoscopically again, so an incision at my belly button, and two at the base of my stomach, to be able to do that under general anaesthetic. I was keen to go back onto HRT, and just come off at the last minute, but they didn’t want me to do that. They just wanted me to stay off the HRT which was tough, again. I could really feel a struggle getting out of bed in the morning, going to work. I just felt like I was walking through mud, to be honest.

And it was at the end of May, last year that I had that tissue grafted. My husband and I made a decision not to tell anyone. To go through this together. We felt like our family had already been through enough highs and lows with us and we’re a strong little unit together, so thought we’d get into that. A bit swollen afterwards. Bit sore, a bit more sore than having the actual ovary taken, that was, the sewing in.

So, they sewed 50 slices to my defunct ovaries and the wall of my abdomen, so the wall of my internal stomach to see whether that tissue… Well, the idea of the abdominal wall is that tissue gets better blood supply from there than the ovary site. That was what the Australian research had found. So, it was just to continue and go on as normal, not on any HRT. Not on any other medications apart from the, the thyroid medication, have blood tests every month, and keep an eye on where the oestrogen, progesterone hormone levels were, to see if any function had restored.

It was about four months, so maybe it was September or October, I just got a call saying, from a blood test, thinking routine, saying, “You’ve got… You’ve got oestrogen go home and take some injections.” We were just overjoyed. We just couldn’t believe it. I had hormones and so I started IVF cycles, related to the ovarian tissue graft and as the next couple of months went on, in terms of hormones, that pilot light had been lit. It was just like, like, someone had turned on the old me, pre-cancer. There’s a life in your body that comes back, that… It was just amazing. Away from the fertility side of things, the hormones incredible. Just incredible. Fertility wise it’s like normal IVF, that you go through, except that, you’re having blood tests

And scans internally, to look at the ovarian site and externally, through your stomach, to look at the abdomen wall site, every second day that could happen in the town where you live and then when your hormones get to a certain level, and the eggs get to a certain size, which is much smaller than normal eggs it’s a call saying, “Be in [city] in 24 hours,” basically, for an egg collection. But the eggs don’t act like normal eggs. They don’t pop out in the normal timeframes or windows and those sorts of things.

So, it takes them a little bit of time to work out when they’re going to be able to get them, if they can get them. Sometimes, I got one, it was too small to be fertilised. Other times, they couldn’t get any, cycle was cancelled. Wait for another month. That sort of thing.

Just before Christmas of last year, a tiny little egg was taken it was too small to be fertilised instantly. It had to be grown in what scientists called a “special liquid,” whatever that means and it did fertilise. But, then my body was out of whack, to actually take the egg at that time. They said it was a good one so they froze it. They’d never actually frozen an egg before, from ovarian tissue grafting, like this. They’d always put them in fresh, if they got them.

By March, I think it was unsuccessful round in January, unsuccessful February as in I had a collection, but nothing worked in the March… They got, in the February, I had one put in, but it didn’t take in the March, they got an egg, but it couldn’t be fertilised, so they said, “Well, let’s just use Frosty from December,” and put that one in and I didn’t think much of it, really, when they said, “Oh, here’s the picture of the of the cell on the screen. Would you like to take a photo?” I said, “No, it didn’t work last month. No thanks. Whatever.”

They put that one in, and low and behold, two weeks later, we got the phone call saying that it was taking and I was pregnant which was exciting, in that I could get pregnant. That’s what we thought of it as, ‘I can get pregnant.’ Not as in, ‘There will be a baby.’ It was a first step cautiously optimistic, but the words echoed over and over. So, three or four days later I had another test, to see whether the HCG level, the pregnancy hormone, had risen and, it had. That’s good. We’ll wait for another three or four days. Now, the blood test. See what happens. That’s good.

So, it’s been days and weeks and months of ticking off little steps of getting through one scan, and getting through one genetic blood marker screening, and getting through, basically being told, “Don’t make your news public, ’til you get through the 20 week scan.”

And now I’m 37 weeks and can’t believe it’s real.

I think it was… the having children thing had been something that was quite high in my mind leading up to that because my ex-partner and I had been planning on having children and I was always going to be the one to have the children and I think after my mum had died there’s nothing like losing your mum to make you think about being a mum.
So that was sort of quite prominent in my mind.

So they explained to me that the ovarian tissue harvest was the only option really, also said that there were pretty minimal examples of it actually being successful in terms of reimplantation but that that was really the only option available at the time and that the tissue would then be frozen until or if required.

So throughout, in the middle of all that I had started a new relationship with [partner] and she was very upfront from the outset about wanting children and that she wanted to have children and it was the first time that I’d sort of thought ‘Oh,’ you know, ‘I was going to be the one to have children back in the old life, old relationship, everything.’ I think still in my head I’d thought ‘Well, I’ll be the one to have the children,’ and that was just a bit of an adjustment I guess.

At one stage when we were going through all of the IVF consultations around family planning there were a few discussions came up about the opportunity or the likelihood of success of the reimplanting my ovarian tissue and as well as the, you know, general lack of success.

I was also advised that because I had a blood cancer and such a progressed one when that tissue sample was taken that there could actually be some kind of risk of introducing, reintroducing that with the tissue reimplantation anyway.

So I still have it in the storage freezer at [fertility service], not that I ever think that we’re actually going to use it, but I don’t know. I feel like I can’t sort of not have it there I guess at the moment. So, I still get hot flushes.

I think every time I get a check-up and I’m told that I’m cancer free it kind of puts everything else into perspective. So you always think that’s the high level of tick that has to be ticked off. I think, I don’t know, I don’t think I ever would have embarked on becoming a single parent. I just don’t think I could have done it. So I don’t think that was ever on the cards for me. I think if I hadn’t have met [partner] and we hadn’t have been able to have the baby I may have investigated the – albeit a bit untested – use of the reimplantation of the ovarian tissue.

I think having been through the IVF process with [partner] I think we were very fortunate that it worked first time. I think having spoken to a number of friends and acquaintances who have been through multiple IVF cycles, sometimes with no success at all, I don’t know how I would have handled if it had of been for me not having success through that.
I think that would have been really difficult. I think I’m very lucky that I’ve been able to become a mum through other means. Yeah. So look, I think the tissue, I’d highly doubt that I’ll ever do anything with it but I don’t feel like I’m ready to let it go for some reason and, you know, if that costs me $100 a month, whatever.

I just need a bit of time to think about it I guess. It still makes me sad that I’ll never have a child that has a genetic connection to my mother particularly but that’s what stories are for and keeping people alive in other ways.

And I think if I really wanted kids and loved kids I’d do the fostering. And part of me believes that, again, this sounds awful, but I feel I can say it as someone who’s gone through menopause, that if you really want kids, there are kids out there to be fostered. And I know this sounds awful, but I often think it’s a selfishness, and this is really awful to say actually, but a selfishness in going to all lengths with surrogacy or with whatever, when there are kids out there who need a family.

And I guess I’d still think about it, because it would be great to have a good influence on someone’s life. But with the fibromyalgia, I honestly get home and I’m exhausted, and I can hardly cook tea. I haven’t physically got it in me to do that. But I know a couple of people who have actually adopted, fostered then adopted children with disabilities, quite severe disabilities too. So yeah, I think there are other ways of having children. Yeah, so that’s an interesting question. But certainly that initial thought was the genetic, was, hit me straight away, but it hasn’t hit me so much later. But having said that, I still feel… well, I’ll say that you see on TV these, these women or couples who are desperate for kids, and I haven’t got that desperation, but I’ve still got that sadness, that the option’s taken away.

We did go and look into adoption, but with adoptions all being open adoptions now with the new laws, the lady who was – because we went to an information session – the lady who was running the information session said, “Look, we know that it’s not really fair, but we have to let you know that the majority of mothers now will not pick a woman over 40 for adoption,” because there’s a lot less babies being put up for adoption, because single motherhood and young motherhood and all that doesn’t have as big a stigma as it used to. And because they’re able to pick, I think they pick three people and then all the investigation goes on. Yeah, they just said they don’t usually care about how old the man is, but they’ll look at the woman and they don’t want someone over 40. And I kind of looked around the room and I thought, ‘The majority of us are either over 40 or really close to 40.’ Because it’s only when you get to that age that you realise that you may be having issues with fertility, unless you’ve had some medical issue in your twenties that’s made you realise it.

And I just thought, wow, that’s just a bit harsh. And it’s a really long drawn out process for adoption in Australia, and it can take a minimum of two years just to get over all the paperwork and investigation. So we looked at that as well and we only started looking when I was 43 I think at that time, and I just thought, ‘I’m going to be at least 45 before they even give us the okay to then start possibly being on the list.’ I said, “There’s no way that we’re going to get chosen.” So we kind of wiped that one off the potential as well.

Yeah, it’s not easy is it?

No. But yeah, look, the doctor knew that we were looking to get pregnant, but his… One of the reasons why I like my gynaecologist, is he’s very black and white, very straight to the point. He will give you all of the options, but he will say, “This is what I recommend, and this is what the issues would be,” and whether you do it or whether you don’t do it.

And he did say to me if I needed to go and seek counselling, if it was something that I needed to look into. But I think it was easier because we’d kind of come to the conclusion, my husband and I had kind of come to the conclusion, that we weren’t going to have kids, even as much as I blamed myself and, you know, it was me that was faulty and I couldn’t have kids, and all the rest of it. We had already come to the idea that, yeah, it wasn’t really going to happen for us, so we had talked about doing other things instead of having kids. Think of all the money we’ll have and we’ll go travelling. Haven’t really done that, but [laughing] the idea’s still there.