Hi, my name is Hannah and me and my husband John have Unexplained Infertility and have been trying to welcome a baby into our family for over 9 years now.

Our story is long and with many hurdles. The latest hurdle is the cost of our next, and final round of IVF. We were told it will cost upwards of £26,000 and we have reached that figure and counting.

As I said our story is long, so for those who don't want to read the novel below you can have the cliff notes and/or watch this YouTube Video

We have been trying for over 9 years to have a baby, being parents together is all we want in life and in 2022 we thought our dreams had come true after our first full round of IVF but sadly we lost the baby. Our subsequent rounds of IVF have failed so our next step is a donor egg round of IVF and we are asking if anyone could help us with the high cost of this treatment, anything you can spare would be gratefully received and will go towards the costs of the treatment which will hopefully end with us holding our longed-for baby in our arms.

Now for those of you who want the the full version, to find out just what we have gone through to get to this point:

I have always wanted to be a Mum, I was always the child who played Mummy to dolls and toys, who loved holding babies, pretending my youngest brother was my daughter Jemima (sorry again Josh!) and when I was old enough to be trusted to look after children my parent's friends would let me look after their little ones on holiday whilst they had a drink, or to take them to the park. I'd be walking around aged 10 with a baby on my hip my 7 year old brother, 2 year old brother and other little ones in tow, acting as if I was a grown up. I think had I have been in a serious relationship when I left university I'd have wanted to get settled down right then and there. Instead it took me until I was 29 to get to that point, we were engaged but not married, owned our own house, we were ready, more than ready...

Our journey trying to have a baby started in 2015, ironically the catalyst to us starting was a friend sharing her infertility story with me and making me realise that I didn't want to wait until we were married in case we had challenges also, little did I know! We had no luck and in 2016 were referred to Bourn Hall Fertility Clinic. Went through all the usual initial tests and they thought I had blocked tubes, I went to have an operation to try to fix that, called Tubal Cannulation but turns out when I was in the operating theatre the surgeon discovered my tubes were not blocked. Which sounds like it is a good thing but that was the only thing that they had found to explain why we weren't getting pregnant so our "cure" was taken away and we were left with a diagnosis of unexplained infertility, so there was nothing we could do now except IVF.

However NHS IVF is a postcode lottery - which means that what help you can access - if any - is dependent on your address. Unfortunately our area was not offering any NHS IVF rounds, so we were going to have to pay ourselves. At the time I was working as a Teaching Assistant and paid a pittance, I was living pay check to paycheck and had debts, so saving that amount of money was not going to be quick. We did what we could in the meanwhile, I lost weight (6.5 stone), we both started reflexology, we took supplements. Then the CCG changed their policy on NHS IVF funding - finally they were offering it in our area! We were advised of the NHS conditions, however were advised incorrectly, meaning we were told my BMI had to be below 30, mine was 24 so not a problem, but they said John's had to be below 35 which it was not. So we wasted time whilst he tried to lose weight that turned out was not necessary at all. We got married that same year, in 2017. After the wedding, we were back on track with NHS funding, but our doctor decided that I needed to have a polyp removed to make sure that there wasn't any factors that might cause the IVF to fail before we started. The waiting lists for a hysteroscopy to remove the polyp were long, even longer if I wanted it done under anaesthetic. So I choose to have it without anaesthetic. I then suffered from Pleurisy which caused me to be bedbound on morphine for nearly 3 months, I gained weight but I was still under the NHS BMI limit. I had the hysteroscopy in January 2020, all went well but my body needed time to recover before we could start the IVF drug protocol, so we had our IVF consultation booked for March 2020.

We all know what happened in March 2020...Covid lockdown, the clinic closed and our appointment was cancelled and we had no idea how long this pause on fertility treatment would be for. I sat at home scrolling social media like a lot of us did in lockdown, but it was becoming increasingly harder to cope, between the lovely posts of special moments friends spent with their children and the posts complaining about their children (God, what I would have given to be in isolation with MY children, to be home-schooling MY children; I wish I was in the Lockdown parent trenches instead of the infertility trenches so badly).

Covid restrictions started lifting and we got our new consultation booked for December. I caught Covid at school 4 days before our appointment. It hit me hard and I was medicated for breathing issues and had to sleep sitting up. The scar tissue from my recent bout of pleurisy was causing issues, the brain fog made me feel senile but the fatigue, the fatigue; was next level and I could barely move for a while, showering felt like a marathon. I gained yet more weight and when having tests for Long Covid in early 2021 found out that Covid had triggered an underactive thyroid (didn't know viruses could cause hypothyroidism until then). My GP said that she wasn't going to medicate me though, I DOUBLE checked that it wasn't going to cause issues with my fertility treatment and the GP swore it was fine. Sadly I then was over the upper NHS BMI for IVF and had to lose weight, when every day was a struggle to just function, let alone go to work, exercising was too much for me, I had to focus on my diet only for months until I got the ability to move more. I got where I needed to be a few months later, only for my clinic to tell me my thyroid needed sorting before I could start treatment, yet another delay...

Finally in September 2021 my thyroid was under control, I started IVF meds in November. We were finally doing this! We were so excited, nervous but excited as hell! I had a scan on Christmas Eve, the day I was supposed to introduce my stimulation injections, I had developed 4 ovarian cysts, I needed to stop the drugs immediately and wait for them to go on their own accord. I was so upset, I couldn't help but get my hopes up with this round of IVF, we were so close, we had been given dates for egg retrieval and embryo transfer and of course I had done some pregnancy math and worked out when my due date would be. So having to cancel was a kick in the gut, we were grieving the loss of the opportunity. Later this same Christmas Eve we found out my brother-in-law and sister-in-law were pregnant. Very bad timing, we weren't in a place to fully celebrate this wonderful news with them.

At the start of February 2022 I had a scan that confirmed my cysts were gone, so we started a new round of IVF, my body reacted quickly to the meds and for once it wasn't a waiting game - we actually had to bring forward the egg retrieval by a week! We only got 5 eggs, I was so disappointed, I know it only takes one but to do IVF through my clinic you basically have to get a qualification on Fertility treatment and there is a whole lot of data on success rates, it is drummed into you the attrition rates and starting with only 5 eggs was not great news. However 3 fertilised and on 22.02.2022 we transferred the best embryo, (the others apparently were good enough to transfer but not good enough to freeze...so bye bye embryos). Then 10 days later, at the crack of dawn before John had to go to work we anxiously sat in the kitchen awaiting John's phone timer to go off so we could look at the pregnancy test (little did I know, until watching the video I took of that moment, that John had sneaked a peak whilst I got myself a glass of water, because he wanted to be prepared so he could support me if it was bad news). But IT WAS POSITIVE, we were PREGNANT! It took 7 years get here but we were on cloud 9 that it worked, especially as we didn't have any frozen embryos. (our NHS funding gave us 2 retrievals, 2 fresh transfers and 2 frozen transfers - so in essence 4 tries - but without any frozen embryos those 4 chances are cut in half to only 2).

Due to following a lot of women on Instagram who make up the online infertility community I was all too aware of the opportunity for things to go wrong, I had seen far too many women posting about losing their IVF babies during their pregnancies. My anxiety was so high, and tragically the worst case scenario happened. At our Viability Scan we were told there was no heartbeat, the baby had stopped growing a few days before the scan. I was so devastated, I was numb. No words and no tears (for those who don't know me, I talk A LOT and I am an emotional mess, I cry at TV adverts and Instagram reels, I cry if someone else cries and I cry reading books/ watching TV all.the.time). We left our clinic with a post-it note with a number for the Early Pregnancy Assessment Unit at our local hospital and were told to call them if we didn't hear from them. I got into my car, John got into his (we had both come from work) and I drove home and he drove to work to get his laptop (he hadn't been thinking worst case scenario like me). I got home and called work to tell my boss I wasn't coming back in and then hospital called me, they booked me in for a scan in a weeks time. At the scan it was confirmed out baby had stopped developing. Then a heavily pregnant nurse (which felt like salt in the wound) asked me what I wanted to do next, let the miscarriage happen naturally, take a tablet to medically cause my body to expel my baby or to have it surgically removed. I opted for surgery, it was finally something I had control over. They booked me in for another week. So I carried my longed for baby for 2.5 weeks after it stopped growing.

I went into hospital at 7am and was finally wheeled into theatre a very hungry, dehydrated, emotional shell of a woman at 11pm. I hadn't eaten for 26hrs and hadn't drunk anything for 23hrs, I was alone that whole time, (except the lovely ladies that kept popping into my room to offer me food and drink I couldn't have!), it was a really rough day. I was discharged the next day and went home to grieve. We went from our highest high to our lowest low in 2 months.

We were told I needed to let my body recover before trying again. But I was in survival mode and that meant I ate my feelings and went over that upper NHS BMI again. Working with children was getting harder and harder to do and I ended up leaving my school for a complete career change. I needed something to help me get out of my pit of despair. So I got a new job in July, left school in October half term and started my new job on the first day of Autumn term 2 - which is the lead up to Christmas and all the joy that brings in a school - I missed it, I missed the children but I knew I had done the right thing. I also knew that I needed a better paying job if we were going to have to go through private rounds of IVF. During my training for my new job John wasn't feeling great and I told him he needed to see the GP for a check up, he put it off, but I nagged like the professional nagger I am and he finally got that check-up, and good job too as when he results came back he was told he needed someone to drive him to A&E immediately because he was dangerously ill and at risk of falling into a coma. His blood sugar levels and ketone levels were fatally low. He was admitted into hospital and put on a drip and wasn't allowed to leave until his levels were considerably higher. He was diagnosed as diabetic that evening. They believed Type 1 because that is how he was presenting to them. This was an absolutely unexpected turn of events. Now he was the one injecting himself constantly!

That Winter I ended up paying hundreds of pounds to a Personal Trainer to help get me where I needed to be because I was so depressed that healthy foods and gruelling workouts were so far away from what I felt capable of and I needed someone to hold me accountable and it couldn't be John because he was also grieving. He came off social media completely, it was too hard for him to be on there at that time.

My sister asked us later that year did we give our baby a name, so she knew what to call them, and I said because of the infertility we hadn't looked at names because it felt like tempting fate and during the years of infertility prior it was too difficult to look at names for children we might never have. I had just been referring to the baby as "November" in my head as that was when our due date was and I felt it was a girl (3 magpies sat in the tree above us as we waited in our car to be called into the clinic for the embryo transfer, and also my Grandma's first baby was a girl and my Mum's first baby was a girl and I liked the idea of continuing that into the next generation too). My sister suggested the name Nova. I looked up the meaning; "a star that suddenly shines brightly before returning to its original state", it seemed perfect, our baby shined so brightly in it's short time, it was so loved and so anticipated by so many. In the baby name sites it means "new" or "bright star". When I spoke to John and told him, he also felt it was perfect. It has been tough seeing babies who were conceived around a similar time to Nova was being born, and then seeing them reach milestones, smiling, walking, talking, saying "mumma" and "dadda" and reaching for their parents when they need that security. So beautiful to see but always bitter sweet never knowing if we would ever get to be the ones who got to share their little ones accomplishments, if we would ever be given the titles Mum and Dad.

In April 2023 we had our final NHS round of IVF, I started acupuncture as a complementary therapy and my fertility doctor prescribed different drugs to inject this time - not the ones that caused the cysts and not the ones that my body reacted too quickly to, but that was probably detrimental because my body DIDN'T react this time. A nurse with the worst bedside manner told me to cancel the round (that would have been it - done, no re-do). I asked for them to keep trying, up the meds, prolong the drug protocol - anything to make this work, if there was a chance, no matter how slim, I was going for it. We got 3 eggs in the end, only 1 survived fertilisation and it only divided into 2 cells, no further, they call this "arresting". There was to be no embryo transfer as there was no embryo. We were devastated yet again but for a different reason.

Then in July we tried again, this time privately. We had to pay for it this time, but as I was on such a low wage when I was a TA and Cover Supervisor in school it meant I had no savings and still had debts hanging over me, and John had little savings because any time something broke, needed replacing or fixing he had to pay because I lived pay day to pay day and using my credit card for petrol and food when my bank balance was worryingly low. Thankfully, my family and John's family were there for us and gifted us money to help us afford treatment so quickly without wasting time to save up. This time we were giving it all we had. I was 38, so age was not on my side, this was our last shot with my own eggs. The doctor put me on growth hormones, a luteinising hormone as well as the follicle stimulating hormone and a double trigger shot. We also tried progesterone injections this time and added aspirin to help prevent miscarriage. I was injecting myself up to 5 times a day. I was alcohol free as always, but this time I was also low sugar, low fat, low gluten, low dairy. I ate only warm foods and stopped drinking cold water as per Chinese medicine advises. I started acupuncture with a different practitioner (she is soooo much better and really helped me to feel calm and positive). I was throwing ALL I had at this. But after all that we only got 4 eggs this time. Only one survived fertilisation. We transferred it and hoped this was our miracle. Our official test day came and those same nerves we had back in 2022 were there but this time with a tinge more hope - it had happened before , it could happen again. Sadly it wasn't to be, 3 negative tests confirmed this transfer was failure. Again this failure was heartbreaking. A third potential negative outcome, it was as if we were ticking them off and we close to shouting BINGO!

We had to look at other options, this clearly wasn't working for us. Donor eggs made sense because of the attrition rate starting with so few eggs really was holding us back. (to explain attrition briefly, for example, if you start with 10 follicles, 65-85% of them will produce eggs, out of the 7 eggs 60-90% of them will be mature, out of the 5 mature eggs 60-80% will fertilise normally, out of the 4 fertilised eggs 60-80% will form embryos by day 3, out of the 3 day-3 embryos only 20-60% of them will become blastocysts ready to transfer - leaving you with possibly 1 embryo at blastocyst stage to transfer. Obviously I've gone with the middle of those ranges for this example, some people will have had better odds and others worse. Some people have nothing at the end of this process and others have loads because some people start with 40 eggs and others, like me, 5 or less. However due to the age of the eggs and quality of the sperm impacting the success rates, just because you start with a high number it doesn't always guarantee success. I think that is something that is a misunderstanding the general population have, that IVF=a baby. You have infertility? IVF is the answer. And for lots of people it can be, but for lots of people it is not and they spend years and thousands upon thousands of pounds, all the while your mental health suffers, your body suffers, your relationship with your partner suffers and your relationships with friends and family suffers and in the end they have to make the very hard decision to stop trying. This is a decision people in my life have had to make for their own wellbeing. We are not there yet and of course hope to never have to be in the position of making that decision.

So our next step, our hail Mary, is a donor egg round. Where we have IVF using someone else's eggs and John's sperm to create hopefully some great quality embryos that make it to blastocyst stage and we can have another shot at this. I had to come to terms with if we were able to have a baby that I would not be genetically related to that child. So I have had to grieve yet another thing, and we have had to think long and hard about if we are happy to bring a child into the world in this way. It means they might question their identity and question our decision but I am happy that in the UK the process is strictly regulated, so allow the child to access their donor's medical history at 16 and their contact details at 18. So it will be possible for them to locate our donor should they wish to. It is a big decision and one we haven't taken on lightly. Any babies will be bought up knowing how they were created, so it won't be a shock later in life, with age appropriate methods they will know their story from as early as they can be read story books to. They will know that their Mummy and Daddy did everything they could to have them and when they couldn't someone helped them and it was that gift that finally bought them to us.

So we are taking this opportunity to say please, if you can give something, anything, it will help us on our way to parenthood. We won't feel like the couple left behind, like we are waiting to get picked for teams in P.E lessons and parenthood is choosing everyone around us as we stand trying not to cry about not being picked, happy to see our friends and family being chosen and wishing we were chosen alongside them. Infertility is really hard, baby loss is hard and the uncertainty is hard. As I said I have friends who have tried and not been successful and have made the tough decision to stop trying. I cannot do that yet, I'm not ready, I don't know who I am, because I truly feel like I was made to be a mother, I helped raise my twin niblings from when they were really little, (who are now 17!), so my sister could return to work and I loved every second of it, don't get me wrong - it was hard work and I got to give them back! Looking after them in the school holidays every year until Covid, I made some of my favourite core memories with them. Raising children truly is a privilege and I would be honoured to be able to do that some day with my own.

The cost of this final round is so high because of various factors, we had some additional testing, we have to buy the donor eggs, and we are doing some additional procedures to help get that successful outcome we are trying so hard for.

As this is our hail Mary, we are opting for IMSI (Intracytoplasmic morphologically selected sperm injection)- a type of IVF where a special microscope (x6000) is used to get very detail images of the semen to pick the best sperm to inject into the eggs. We are also having GERI which allows the embryos to be monitored by cameras so they are not disturbed by the embryologists checking on their progress. Also Embryo Glue which is an add-on that we haven't yet used, lots of clinics do it as standard. These costs all add up, even basic mandatory things like blood tests done on both of us costs £570. The eggs and the transfers (we can have 1 fresh and 2 frozen transfers within this cycle) are £20,000 alone.

I hate asking for money, be it borrowing a hundred pounds from my parents when I was a broke student, or asking for a tenner back from a mate who borrowed it, it makes me uncomfortable. However I have to overcome that awkwardness to be able to get as much financial support as possible, because that is how important this is to me. Also the thing is, if we get a positive pregnancy test, the cost will go up because of requiring medication for the first trimester, and if we are unsuccessful we can have those 2 frozen transfers that are part of the package - if we have embryos to freeze - but we still need to buy all the drugs each round and potentially have further testing. And of course BABIES ARE NOT CHEAP, so if we are successful, we are starting off parenthood in debt because of how expensive it was for us to do something the majority of people do for free. So please give if you can, share with anyone you think might be able to help, maybe you know someone with a similar story who can empathise. We are grateful for anything you can do to help. Thank you so much for sticking with me to explain our journey so far, I hope to add a happy chapter to our story next.

Thank you to everyone who has been there for John and I so far on this journey. Who have supported us with kind words, hopes and prayers. Who have helped try to pick us up after our failed rounds, the hurdles, the disappointments, the bad news, the loss. I have always maintained that if babies were born from love alone we would have a football team by now! So many people in our lives have wished us success on this journey, have willed us a healthy baby in our arms and for the heartache to end, they have prayed for us to become parents, manifested those 2 lines and kept their fingers crossed for us, year after year, round after round. Hopefully this is our time. Hopefully we finally will meet our destiny to become parents. If you cannot help financially, please send prayers, manifestations and general good vibes our way. We are grateful for anything and everything.

Love and thanks

Hannah & John

(I'm still not sure how this site works but I think I can add "updates" where I can detail costs so you can see exactly what they are but also progress updates from the round).

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