Magic Bean Miracle

An update.... thank you so much to everyone for your support and donations. It absolutely means the world to us. Some of you we know as friends and some of you are complete strangers, we couldn't be more grateful (and a little overwhelemed) with the level of support we have received from you all. Some of you have even shared your own stories with us and we feel honoured to be able to hear them as we know how difficult and emotional this journey is. As of last night we reached our initial target which meant we have been able to speak to our preffered clinics today. Because it looks like I am going to need additional medication to get this round to work as best it can and give us the best possible chance, we have been quoted that this could be up to an additional £5k on medication, so we have had to move the target slightly and hope for the best.

This is a really difficult post to do. We don't share very much about our real life online and writing this makes us feel really quite vulnerable but we are running out of time and options and we are so very desperate for a baby so here goes....

James and I have been together 14 years, 12 years of that we have been trying to conceive...without success and each and every month being devastated that it hadn't happened. Investigations told us we had unexplained infertility and would need IVF. It's been a really long journey to even get a referral in for IVF. Ive spent 2 years shifting 4 stone to get my BMI down. This was made harder with me having fibromyalgia and unable to exercise like normal people, but I managed it. We have both taken every supplement going and made sure we were as healthy as we could be. Our referral went in when I was 40 but it was still a year to wait before treatment could start. And because of my age we only got 1 round. We've isolated since Easter this year because the risk of catching covid would have delayed our treatment by 3 months. Miserable as it is being unable to see friends and family, we were happy to do this, we didn't want to risk having treatment delayed. Treatment started on my 41st birthday this year, our chances were low, because of my age I now have low ovarian reserve. But we went in hopeful, by July it became clear that the stimulation hormones weren't working very well our only saving grace at this point was there was an impending doctors strike which meant they could cancel our treatment and offer us another round. We were absolutely gutted but grateful for at least getting another chance. The next round started in August, I was given different stimulation hormones in the hopes we would get at least 1 decent follicle. We did it, we were thrilled (the consultant less so). We were booked in for egg collection, we were told there might not even be an egg. But we did it, we got an egg. We even got that egg to fertilise into an embryo and managed an embryo transfer. But unfortunately the day before the beta blood test auntie flow arrived and we knew we'd lost our little embryo. Devastated doesn't even cut it, it's actually really hard to type this and put ourselves out there emotionally but we are not ready to give up, we are not ready to accept not having a baby and this is why we are sharing our story, we need to raise £15k and quickly (by February at the latest) so that we can do a self funded round of ivf. Time is not on our side at all, I've only got until I'm 42 to get treatment done and we can't raise that money in that time frame by ourselves. Right now we are grieving but even in our grief we dont want to lose hope. We are hoping the power of gofundme, social media and the kindness of strangers may help us, we'd be so grateful for any donation anyone can give to help us on our journey, and another smaller ask to please help by sharing our page.