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Suvi Mahonen and her husband Luke and their b\u0430b\u0443, Spencer. Picture: Natalie Grono<\/p>\n
Seven years, 31 IVF attempts, an egg bought from Russia … baby Spencer’s arrival to 48-year-old Suvi Mahonen (@suvi_mahonen<\/a>) in \u0430 Gold Coast hospital is nothing short of \u0430 miracle. But the experience is becoming increasingly common<\/strong>.<\/p>\n 21 January 2023 | The Weekend Australian Magazine | \u0412\u0443 Jamie Walker (@jamiewalkertheoz<\/a>)<\/p>\n The link to the original at The Weekend Australian Magazine website \u2192<\/a><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Their blue-eyed boy was to be delivered by caesarean section at 8am on a steamy Tuesday on Queensland’s Gold Coast, in a birthing suite that seethed with emotion. The arrival of a baby is always momentous yet in this case it was truly remarkable, bordering on miraculous. Though her belly was numb from spinal painkillers, Suvi Mahonen could feel the obstetrician tugging and pulling, more and more urgently. Her husband, Luke, perched like a hawk over her shoulder, was doing his best to reassure her but there was an edge in his voice – and if he was anxious, that couldn’t be good. No, no, no. Surely it couldn’t go wrong now. By all rights the pregnancy should never have happened, let alone progressed to this decisive point. Aged 48, Suvi had undergone an unheard-of 31 rounds of IVF in Australia, the US and finally Russia. Count them because she did, over and over again, weighing the disappointment and near-ruinous expense against the mounting odds that she would successfully conceive. “It was nuts,” says Luke, 50, and he should know.<\/p>\n To the other expectant mothers in his life Luke is Dr Waldrip, a senior staff specialist obstetrician and gynaecologist at the Gold Coast University Hospital, veteran of a thousand challenging births. Yet today, with the surgical team at work under the direction of colleague Elrich Sem, he is just another nervous father-to-be holding his wife’s hand and hoping for the best. True to form, there has been a late complication. Suvi went perilously close to miscarrying at 13 weeks, then developed gestational diabetes and preeclampsia, forcing her to be brought into hospital five days early. There, the baby was found to be in the breech position – head up rather than down – a concern even when the delivery was by C-section.<\/p>\n \u0412\u0430b\u0443 Spencer. Picture: Natalie Grono<\/p>\n Luke can generally get a newborn out within two minutes of making the first incision. But as the time crawls by – five minutes, seven minutes – Sem has had to resort to forceps to release the baby’s snagged head. The tension in the crowded operating theatre is palpable. “What really scared me is the look on Luke’s face was sort of getting more and more concerned,” Suvi remembers. A freelance journalist, she was never going to let this story pass her by; our photographer, Natalie Grano, is present in the delivery suite along with the couple’s videographer.<\/p>\n Fortunately for Suvi, a screen is blocking her view of the operation but she can tell from the dull sensation of the surgeon’s strenuous efforts that there is nothing delicate about what is happening. Finally, thankfully, Spencer Harold Waldrip emerges at 10.36am, kicking and crying lustily, weighing in at a healthy 3.3kg. “I can hear him, I can hear him,” Suvi says, her voice thick. She reaches out and touches the baby’s sticky foot as if to prove he’s genuine, that this isn’t another of those crushing missteps they’ve had to endure. Luke’s face is wreathed in a broad, relieved grin. “Say hi to Mummy,” Sem smiles, lifting the squirming infant high enough for her to see. “There he is,” she says. “Oh darling.”<\/p>\n They’re all home when we next catch up, the day after her discharge<\/strong> from hospital. Luke looks tired but relaxed in beach shorts while their nine-year-old daughter, Amity, cradles her sleeping brother on the couch. Mum and bub each had their moments after the drama of the birth: she lost 3.2 litres of blood in a post-operative bleed while little Spencer had to be treated for transient tachypnea – wet lung – and low blood sugar. Both are on the mend. Suvi is radiant, her skin aglow. She has to pinch herself that, after everything they’ve been through, there’s an all-too real baby to show for it. What a rollercoaster ride it has been. Looking back, the couple aren’t sure how they lasted the distance when the year-on-year grind of fertility treatment was so relentless.<\/p>\n Suvi with daughter Amity. Picture: Natalie Grono<\/p>\n According to a 2021 study by researchers at the University of NSW, 81,000 IVF cycles<\/strong> take place each year in Australia for some 15,000 babies – just on five per cent of all births. The average classroom in this country can be expected to contain at least one child conceived in a glass laboratory dish.<\/p>\n It’s a much canvassed function of how we live: with increased education and apparent work opportunities, Australian women like their counterparts in other developed countries started waiting longer to begin a family. In 1981, fewer than 15 per cent of those having their first child were aged over 30; these days, it’s more than 51 per cent, the Institute of Family Studies reports. But that has implications for the prospects of a successful pregnancy. To put it bluntly, human eggs do not age well. From the age of 33, the rate of chromosomal abnormality accelerates, tipping 80 per cent by a woman’s 40th birthday, studies show.<\/p>\n Suvi and Luke’s experience is increasingly common. While they married early -she was 21 – travel and careers were prioritised over children. “The honest truth is we weren’t that ducky for many years,” she says. “We thought, ‘well, we’ve got plenty of time,”‘ which might have been true for him, but not her. “For us women, evolution hasn’t caught up with the way we want to live our lives,” she continues. “We had to learn that the hard way.”<\/p>\n By the time they got serious about getting pregnant, Suvi was 35 and having fertility issues. She took Clomid, an estrogen booster to aid ovulation. The drug worked. Her once-regular period, however, didn’t return after she gave birth to Amity, an ominous sign in retrospect. Another two years went by before they decided their little girl needed a sibling.<\/p>\n Clomid wasn’t going to help given Suvi’s misfiring menstrual cycle. In 2015 they launched into IVF full of hope and, of course, trepidation, because if anyone understood the precarious risk-reward ratio it was her husband. Both were insistent about using their own genetic constituents – his seed, her eggs. The problem was Suvi’s ovaries were now deeply compromised. Strike One.<\/p>\n They weighed the near-ruinous expense against mounting odds she’d conceive.<\/p>\n They travelled to Melbourne to start IVF treatment. Through round after painful and taxing round, the eggs that could be harvested proved unusable: when fertilised with Luke’s sperm and reimplanted, the embryos did not take. To make matters worse, Suvi’s bowel was agonisingly perforated by a probe during one procedure. The couple decided to head to the US, where they’d had six embryos chromosomally tested. The man in the white coat at the pricey Los Angeles clinic shook his head when Luke asked about their viability; all were grossly abnormal. Suvi went numb. Given Suvi’s fertility issues, they should think about using donor eggs, the doctor said gently, because her own were never going to work.<\/p>\n Instead, sticking with their preference to use their own sperm and egg, they doubled down. The more eggs collected, they reasoned, the better the chances of turning up one that would stick. On round nine they lucked in: 10 specimens, potentially enough to produce six or seven embryos. But when the lab results came back, Luke’s hesitancy on the phone was telling. Surely one of them was viable? Suvi asked. “None,” he said.<\/p>\n Being prepared for C-section. Picture: Natalie Grono<\/p>\n They pressed on, burning through cash. IVF Australia puts the cost of a round at $10,275, about half of which is rebated through Medicare. Suvi doesn’t know how people without their means could afford multiple attempts. Even with Luke’s generous salary, they struggled. Their cheerfully cluttered unit in Surfers Paradise is hardly a dream family home, she says, pointing to the gleaming waterfront properties across the Nerang River. “We don’t own a second car, we don’t take overseas holidays and we certainly don’t live in a mansion like one of those,” she says. “I’m not complaining. We’re lucky we could afford to go as far as we did with IVF. But we sacrificed a lot along the way.”<\/p>\n Spencer’s nursery. Picture: Natalie Grono<\/p>\n By 2019, round 26, they had reached a decision. After each pickup procedure, conducted under a light anaesthetic, the recovery nurse would write on the back of Suvi’s hand the number of eggs retrieved. There was no figure this time, which meant zero. “My ovaries had totally given up,” she says. Strike two.<\/p>\n OK, they would go with a donor. The question was, how? Under Australian law, no money can change hands: the process is altruistic, meaning the egg-giver can have her out-of-pocket expenses met, but must not profit from the arrangement. Some people turn to a relative or friend, unavailable to them. Their options were to import frozen ova from overseas, travel to an international clinic or find a good Samaritan here. In the end, they posted on a closed Facebook group, Egg – Donations Australia, hoping for a match.<\/p>\n The initial responses were underwhelming, to say the least. One Sydney woman said she would love to be able to take regular holidays at the beach to see “her kid”. As they discovered, the expectation of an ongoing relationship was common among donors. Suvi chooses her words carefully, conscious that she doesn’t want to seem ungrateful. “You’d see on the Facebook site where they’re talking about the donors and saying things like, ‘Oh, they don’t need much, maybe a yearly card and photos of the child every so often, just so they feel part of it.’ I get it, that’s not much to ask at all when you consider what they are prepared to do for us. But this is our family. And remember, I don’t know this person and I don’t necessarily want to spend the rest of my life dealing with a person I don’t know … giving them some sort of sense of ownership over our family. We felt uncomfortable about it.”<\/p>\n Luke filming Suvi during the C-section. They were looking abroad, feeling more bruised than ever, when midwife Leeah Flynn reached out. A kindly woman of 37 from Kingscliff, northern NSW, with five sons of her own, she was moved by Suvi’s honesty. “I knew she was never going to give up until she had a baby,” Flynn says. Right off, Suvi felt they were in sync: “Leeah was different. She said, ‘I’ve got everything I need’, she didn’t want anything from us.” The last of her reservations fell away when Flynn forwarded an article about epigenetics – how the birth mother always puts her imprint on a baby, down to fingerprints, regardless of the conception process.<\/p>\n On December 9, 2020, Suvi was about to throw the pregnancy test stickin the bin when she noticed the faintest of pink lines. Could the second embryo grown from Flynn’s donated eggs have done the business? After all the disappointment, she wasn’t about to get ahead of herself, and just as well. Follow-up tests showed it to be a false positive.<\/p>\n They imported a batch of seven frozen eggs from the US at an eye-watering cost of $27,000, but only five thawed. One of the remaining eggs failed to fertilise, and just two of the four subsequent embryos started mitosis, cell division. A lone survivor made it to day two. “It only takes one,” Luke told her and for a while it looked like this could be it: an eight-cell blastocyst on day three, a promising morula of 16 cells on day four. She was getting ready to leave home for the clinic on day five, transfer day, when the phone rang. “I’m sorry,” he said. Strike three.<\/p>\n Suvi didn’t feel a thing when he slid the scalpel across her abdomen. “Is he out yet?” she asked. The minutes felt like days. “And then I heard Spencer cry.”<\/p>\n Luke’s friend Alexander Polyakov, an IVF specialist in Melbourne, suggested they try Russia’s O.L.G.A. clinic – the eponymous preserve of St Petersburg obstetrician-gynaecologist Olga Zaytseff, who pithily advertises a full refund if treatment fails – “our livebirth guarantee assurance”. Before Covid-19 closed the international borders in 2020, Luke had been running the ruler over fertility centres where donor-based IVF is legal in Cyprus, Greece, the Czech Republic and South Africa. (Their budget could no longer stretch to the US, at four times the cost.) Zaytseff’s money-back guarantee clinched it, not only financially. Luke saw it as a vote of confidence in the service she offered. Her professional bona fides checked out, as did the refund offer. Of the 750 patients who took out reimbursable packages in the five years to October 2022, 474 ended up with a baby, with another 252 either pregnant or undergoing treatment, according to records Zaytseff provided. The remaining 24 were repaid 30-100 per cent of their outlay, depending on when they exited the program. (The magazine independently confirmed such payments to a number of couples in Europe). Luke was reassured that Polyakov had visited the clinic and came away impressed; he began putting together the $65,000 to send Suvi.<\/p>\n She arrived in St Petersburg on a snowy Thursday in January 2021, relieved to be met at the airport. Located in a stately building on Nevsky Prospekt, facing the czars’ famed Kazan Cathedral, the place was shiny and new, staffed by unhurried English-speaking nurses and doctors. The IVF regimen was different from what she had experienced before, starting with an intensive workup with progesterone gel and oestrogen patches to ready her body. “They really throw the book at you in Russia,” she says.<\/p>\n Suvi reaches for Spencer after the birth. She flew home to continue the preparation, injecting herself daily with progesterone in a “training cycle” ahead of implantation. A paid Russian egg donor had been found, something Suvi and Luke were on board with. “I just think it’s a simpler, more straightforward process,” he says. They returned to St Petersburg together on March 13 for the procession of tests, scans and procedures that they knew all too well after 30 rounds of IVF. Following the embryo transfer, rated a prime 4AA by the attending specialist, Luke carefully studied images of the growing blastocyst, telling his wife the difference from the previous attempts was “profound”. Back on the Gold Coast, Suvi took a pregnancy test on April 4: two lines, pink and solid. Her spirits soared.<\/p>\n Thirteen weeks later she was lying on the bathroom floor at <\/strong> The ambulance rushed her to Luke’s hospital where one of his registrars took charge while he retched into a sink. “I was pretty sure the pregnancy was gone,” he recalls. But at last some luck. The placenta had only partly detached, leaving the umbilical cord intact, preserving the baby’s lifeline. As if they needed reminding, it drove home that nothing, absolutely nothing, could be taken for granted.<\/p>\n At week 26, Suvi was found to have developed gestational diabetes and the often related condition of preeclampsia, manifested by high blood pressure. She took the medicine as well as medical advice to take it easy while the weeks wound down to her appointment with Sem in the delivery suite. For once, Luke’s encyclopaedic knowledge of childbirth was an encumbrance for both of them. Specialists of his seniority deal mostly with difficult cases or emergencies and over the years he had shared with her horror stories of what could and did go wrong, even in seemingly straightforward births. “There are some things you would rather not know,” Suvi says.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/olgafertilityclinic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Page_02.jpg\")
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\nPicture: Natalie Grono<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/olgafertilityclinic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Page_09.jpg\")
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\nPicture: Natalie Grano<\/p>\n
\nmidnight,<\/strong> listening to her blood gurgle down the drain. Luke suspected the placenta had ruptured, putting both mother and baby at grave risk. Suvi could hear her husband talking to himself: hold it together, hold it together. “We’re losing him,” she said. No, no, no.<\/p>\n\n\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/olgafertilityclinic.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/02\/Page_11-300x225.jpg\")
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