In Spring 2017, after 7 years of struggle, 12 egg retrievals and ICSIs, 16 fresh and frozen embryo transfers and 4 inseminations with donor sperm, Maria, 34 and Sebastian, 30, have contacted Swedish coordinator at our clinic. The 7 year struggle Maria and Sebastian have described eariler here. Now they continue telling you the happy ending of this story:
“We quickly got in touch with a Swedish coordinator. There were no queues and we sent in our records. We took more samples that we submitted. After a few phone and Skype meetings, a plan was created for us.
In the autumn of 2017 we flew with mixed feelings to St. Petersburg.
Of course, we were nervous to go to another country and receive treatment. I was anesthetized at egg retrieval, which was incredibly nice considering all the egg retrievals made in Sweden had been without any anaesthetics. The clinic suggested that we do 50/50 fertilization of the eggs. Meaning fertilizing eggs from both a donor and Sebastian.
There were two blastocysts of the best quality. One from a donor and one from Sebastian. The clinic chose to freeze both embryos. We went home and had to wait for about two months for embryo transfer. By this time, it was very difficult to just wait out the time, but we kept together and tried to live in the present. At the end of November 2017, we went back to St. Petersburg again and received an embryo of our own egg and sperm cells and of the best quality.
Two weeks later we received a message that we had never received during these 7 years, we were shocked. It's POSITIVE!
We hardly dared to believe it was true, but 5-6 different pregnancy tests could not be wrong.
We were booked for an early ultrasound at our clinic in Sweden. Unfortunately, we were told there was no life left in my stomach. Of course, the message was very tough and upsetting, but we were still happy that we had finally got a positive result. - I could get pregnant. It gave us incredible strength to keep going.
Christmas passed and in March 2018 we returned to O.L.G.A. Clinic for egg retrieval. This time, the eggs were fertilized with sperm solely from Sebastian, which felt great. This was done, because the former embryo with our own egg and sperm cells had been so good.
We went home and waited, and in May we flew back and got an embryo of the best quality returned. Two weeks later we received the same message. POSITIVE again! We were so happy, at the same time, we didn't really dare hope too much. The weeks went by and in week 8 we found out, for the first time, that there was a life in there.
We booked an extra ultrasound in week 12 to calm our nerves, everything looked good. In September when we went for a routine ultrasound in week 20, and again saw that everything looked good.
We would finally become parents after an 8-year long struggle. It felt surreal, but at the same time absolutely fantastic!
The baby was scheduled for January 27, 2019. On January 26, a healthy and stable boy came to us with the help of Caesarean section after a completely normal and almost painless pregnancy. We are the world's happiest parents to the world's most beautiful Harry!
If we summarize our journey in Sweden we have done 12 egg retrievals, 12 fresh and 4 frozen embryo transfers in Sweden. We have also gone through 4 inseminations with donated sperm in Sweden. All treatments without a single positive result.
We are forever grateful for the fantastic help we received from all the staff at O.L.G.A. Clinic. The hospitality and personalised treatment from Dr. Olga Zaytseff and her colleagues, from reception staff, to nurses and doctors has been absolutely fantastic and we have been treated with professionalism and great respect. We have tremendous confidence in Dr. Elena Lapina who performed our entire treatment, from stimulation to egg retrieval and finally transfer. The information on the development of the embryos was clear and we were completely involved throughout the process. Another contact that was incredibly important to us was the Swedish coordinator Maria Jeffs. It felt great to be able to communicate in Swedish. Maria was always courteous and responded quickly via both phone and mail if you had any thoughts during the process. We sincerely hope that more couples in our situation will be given the opportunity to come to O.L.G.A. Clinic in St. Petersburg. We only have positive things to say about the whole set-up and we are happy to provide references to couples who have any questions or concerns.
With the facts in hand, we of course wish we had gone to Russia earlier. Then we would most likely not have gone through 16 unsuccessful treatments which involved a great deal of mental and physical pain, but which at the same time taught us an incredible amount.
Best regards
Maria, Sebastian & Harry Lindström from Sweden”
Maria and Sebastian have also kindly provided their contacts for you if you wish to contact them personally:
maria@icasveg.se
sebastian@icasveg.se
Instagram: @mariakristinlindstrom
Maria and Sebastian will travel to Stockholm to tell you their story in Swedish in our Big Fertility Weekend in Stockholm 16 and 17 November 14:00-16:00, Strandvagen 7A.
Please register and join any of the two dates at 14:00 as long as seats available.
Dr. Olga comments
Sebastian, Dr. Elena and I had a discussion lately, trying to understand what we have done different in St. Petersburg what helped?
— Helped to achieve implantation on the first ICSI, which has never happened before.
— Helped to achieve ongoing pregnancy and live birth on the second ICSI.
We do not see anything different from what we usually do in our IVF process here:
- Individualized stimulation to have competent strong eggs.
- Elegant and soft ICSI procedure in the lab.
- Careful and reliable growing embryos 5 days to achieve blastocysts (Sebastian and Maria say they have never had blastocysts of such high quality before)
- Freezing embryos by vitrification which has 95% survival rates in our clinic. The pupose of freezing is to stop time for embryos and move focus to endometrium.
- After 1 cycle break after egg retrieval we focus on preparing endometrium to embryo transfer with the help of hormonal treatment. This treatment aims at precise scheduling of implantation window and hence high implantation rates.
- Soft but targeted at the right spot embryo transfer.
- Reliable hormonal support after embryo transfer until little embryo is strong enough to take care of itself.
We have this system and we just use it the best we can. Hope we can help more couples. Just come and talk to us 13 and 14 November in Oslo, 16 and 17 November in Stockholm.
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