Our journey towards parenthood was a short (1 year) but an intensive one. In my country I was considered to be too old for getting a baby and even though there is a socially financed program for childless couples, we were running out of time to qualify for it. I had my own eggs frozen from some years back and I insisted on using them, but it did not work out. Interestingly the doctors waited just 2 days after fertilization so in principle they did not know the quality of the embryos they were putting in. I then contacted a clinic in a neighbouring country, but got the answer that the quality of my own eggs at this stage was too low. Neither of these two countries had egg donation option for us. Luckily, one of these clinics mentioned that there was a clinic in Russia where we could potentially turn to if we decided for egg donation. In our situation this was the only chance to start a full family, so we did not hesitate. From that moment it took us literally 5-6 weeks till we went to Russia full of anticipation.<\/p>\n
During these weeks, we had an intensive email correspondence both with the Russian clinic personnel and with the British patient coordinator. Both sides were extremely professional and pleasant, answered to our questions and explained how things worked. We got access to the donor database where we could choose our donor. We found it extremely useful to have data not only on the basic physical parameters, but also the medical history, donors’ childhood or teenage photos and the letter from the donor. The letter was actually the last factor that got us to choose our donor. After that we also had a telephone conversation with doctor Olga during which we settled the last details.<\/p>\n
On arrival to St. Petersburg we were met at the airport by a driver who was working with the clinic, which was really welcoming and nice! Then we did some tests at the clinic, eggs were collected from our donor and fertilised. The embryos were 5 days of age when they were transferred, at which stage Dr. Olga could pick out the best quality ones. We put two embryos to be on the safe side, and now we are expecting a baby girl in December.<\/p>\n
One more thing that I was especially grateful for to the clinic and to our British coordinator, Tamsin Bowers, is the plan B kit and support. It is for the cases when one gets bleeding in early stages of pregnancy. They explained that it might happen and gave us prescription for medication, which we bought and brought with us from Russia. It happened in the evening. I wrote to our British coordinator and got a call from her within minutes. She calmed me down and reminded me what I was supposed to do to stop it. By noon next day the bleeding stopped. By that time I have not even managed to get my local clinic to call me back. I was so happy that I did not have to rely on it anymore.<\/p>\n
I felt I was in caring and professional hands even though I was thousand of miles away from both Russia and the UK. The entire experience was like a miracle, after plenty of disappointments we got what we wanted and it felt so easy and so right. I can nothing else but recommend my clinic in Saint-Petersburg and would also like to thank the whole team again very much! Fingers crossed we might be able to come back for the second baby!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Our journey towards parenthood was a short (1 year) but an intensive one. In my country I was considered to be too old for getting a baby and even though there is a socially financed program for childless couples, we were running out of time to qualify for it<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[98],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n