Jennifer and Simon: (@ttcenbebis, @jenniferbckstrm)
Ever heard of lucky number seven? No? Well now you have!
Me and my husband met early on in life and wanted to start a family. My mother had miscarriages and my parents only ever had me.
Because of that I never took having a baby for granted. So when we got pregnant on the first try I remember saying “is it really going to be THIS easy?”. And no, It was not going to be that easy for us either.
Before going to the clinic I have had five pregnancies that all ended in miscarriages, one before Simon when I was very young, and four with Simon.
We struggled in Sweden for a couple of years with endless investigations as to why we could not keep the pregnancy, but in Sweden they had no answer and just told us “you are so young, keep trying”. That answer was not anything I could accept. Why should we keep doing the same thing over and over just because we are young and had the time? We wanted to start our family just as much as anyone else.
I sought out to a few private IVF clinics in Sweden that all said that they were willing to offer us a package of 3 IVF cycles. But they had no specific plan to help us further along then to get pregnant, and that was not our problem. We needed a plan on how to stay pregnant.
And this is were O.L.G.A. clinic enters our story.
I was desperate to find a solution, we said to ourselves that “we could go to the end of the world if we could find our solution there”. So I started googling “multiple miscarriage + ivf clinic”, and then I found O.L.G.A.. We came in contact with a few former Swedish patients and asked about their experience, that all came with happy endings and a baby in their arms. So we decided to start our treatment at O.L.G.A..
We started our treatment in late 2020 right before the new year. And our first visit to St. Petersburg was in February 2021 for egg-retrieval. Since I had suffered from several miscarriages, the clinic wanted us to do PGT-a on our embryos, and luckily we did. Out of 9 embryos only 4 were healthy and ready for transfer. We then did ERA-test and hysteroscopy, which was our second trip to the clinic.
After that we were ready for transfer and in summer of 2021 we had our first transfer! Sadly, this also ended in a miscarriage.
It felt as I would never become a mother, I wanted to give up on my dream. But instead I took the summer off from thinking too much about IVF, I had a long talk with my lovely doctor (Dr. Nina) and I also spoke to the clinic's psychologist that we were offered to talk to. After this we were ready to try one more time!
So in the beginning of October I went back and we did another transfer. And this became our lucky number seven! My seventh pregnancy and the pregnancy that gave us Theodor. The biggest love of our lives, our son.
Me and Simon can only say good things about the clinic. We have always felt so welcome despite our young age. They never questioned my desire on becoming a mother early on, as I felt they did in Sweden. I always got told “live your life when you are young and have babies later” when we wanted to get help in Sweden. But the clinic took us in with open arms, and then they left us with our hearts full of love and a baby in our arms.
With love, Jennifer and Simon
What has helped Jennifer and Simon keep their long desired pregnancy and achieve live birth after 6 losses?
Dr. Anna Gusareva explains:
Our dear patients Jennifer and Simon came to O.L.G.A. clinic in their early twenties but have already endured a lot — 3 years of trying, 5 pregnancy losses and refusal of local clinics to take them
seriously because of their young age… We decided to split their treatment process into smaller projects, as we always do, focusing each time on one of the possible reasons why this adorable couple still had no baby.
First we performed an individualised ovarian stimulation and egg retrieval and got 9 gorgeous blastocysts on day 5-6 of embryo development. Normally we would not propose to do genetic testing of the embryos (PGT-A) with maternal age this young, but many pregnancy losses in the past make us believe that we need to check the embryos, just to be sure they are chromosomally normal. And we were surprised with the result — more than half of the blastocysts had abnormal chromosome number! Only 4 out of 9 blastocysts were actually normal! (The proportion of chromosomally normal blastocysts in women at Jennifer’s age is about 70–75%.)
Next we focused on maternal factors, performed a complete check-up of the uterus by hysteroscopy and ERA test. We found that Jennifer's implantation window was actually 12 hours earlier than in the majority of women. This may explain some of early miscarriages — embryo just came too late in the uterus in the natural cycle and did not have enough time to “catch the ground”. We also made immunological and inflammatory checks and created an individual recipe on how to prepare Jennifer for the embryo transfer. Jenifer has got anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antiviral and immune-modulating treatment before her first embryo transfer resulted in pregnancy but it sadly was lost either. We changed the therapy and the second embryo transfer worked and little Theodor arrived!
So, here we see a classic example of a combination of embryonic and maternal factors, which probably caused repeated pregnancy losses in the past. Jennifer and Simon got their long awaited son Theodor because they had a lot of persistence and courage. We in O.L.G.A. Clinic just added PGT-A, hysteroscopy, ERA test, individualised antibacterial, antiviral, immunomodulating treatment spiced with love, care and support to help to make it happen.
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