Our Parents are 1 in 6

After we were married, we decided that we would start trying for children early on as neither of us were getting any younger and we wanted to grow with our children. I had never been one for counting days of my cycle and was none the wiser that I had been having very irregular cycles for quite some time, after about 6 months I decided to start keeping track of my cycles which is when I started to realize that there was a problem here, some cycles were 30 days and some 60 and no regular pattern whatsoever.

I contacted my gynae and she put me on various treatments for 6 months, to no avail. We then decided to go and see a fertility specialist, he performed various tests on both of us and diagnosed me with chronic PCOS and blocked Fallopian tubes due to endometriosis.

We decided that we would try one round of IUI first just on the off chance that my tubes weren’t completely blocked and if that didn’t work on to IVF, our IUI was unsuccessful so it was onto IVF.

We had one unsuccessful round of IVF, 6 eggs retrieved, 5 viable. 3 embryo’s transferred and 2 frozen.

Second round of IVF, 3 eggs retrieved, 2 viable, both transferred and this resulted in a positive Singleton pregnancy. I went on to have an uneventful pregnancy and our beautiful girl was born at 41 weeks weighing 3.7kg.

When Dani was just over a year we decided to start this process again and we decided to try frozen embryo transfer, we went through the process and both embryos ceased and that was the end of that. I was heartbroken and we made the decision that we were so fortunate to have been able to conceive one child (relatively easily) so we would leave it at that and not subject our hearts (or bodies) to any further treatment.

Much to our complete shock, I fell pregnant naturally and our second little girl was born in December 2017.

Fertility treatment is a hard road and it is testing on your marriage and hard on your body, but we learned that it was easier to be open with friends and family and we decided that to avoid being asked questions all the time which can be so hurtful, we would be open and honest about our situation, and that saved many tears and many awkward moments.

Our beautiful girls, Dani (2 years conceived via IVF) and Nikki (6 weeks old, conceived naturally) our little miracles.