I can remember sitting in the waiting room at the clinic waiting for our appointment. We had reached the top of the list for public funding, it was our first round of IVF, our first treatment cycle. I have severe endometriosis & my husband had anti-sperm and anti-bodies. We were given a 10% chance of conceiving naturally, but our only treatment option was IVF.

While we were waiting, I read a story the Dandelion Newsletter about embryo donation & said to my husband “I want to donate our embryos”. At this point, we hadn’t started treatment, I hadn’t had my egg collection... nothing. The patient man that I married, squeezed my hand and said, “let’s get through this first”.

We had 9 eggs collected, 5 fertilised & we had 3 embryos that made it to blastocyst. We had a fresh transfer at day 5 and long story short - our IVF miracle turns 5 in January!

Our son was born in January 2016, the plan was to recover from the birth, get fertility fit and get ready to transfer in January 2017, the age gap was ideal, I had everything planned! What I wasn’t expecting was to fall pregnant naturally when my son was 7 months old. I was in shock and disbelief; I didn’t think this could happen. After the birth of my second son, my husband and briefly touched based on donating our embryos again but life was busy with two under 16 months, so we parked that thought. Then ... 10 weeks postnatal, I was pregnant again. We have three gorgeous boys; I had the boys within 2 years and 4 months. My two youngest are Irish twins, they are 11 months apart and for 18 days every year, they are the same age.

When my youngest was 6 weeks, I contacted the clinic to start the ball rolling about embryo donation, I had a great call with the counsellor who said that we had to wait a year, in case we had a change of mind. At this point my husband had had the snip, our family was complete.

Skip to August 2019, we were able to start the process of embryo donation / adoption. With excitement we completed our paperwork and then Covid arrived! In May we were able to view profiles and we selected a family that had the same values as us and we chose to go ahead with their profile.

Sadly, our application has been declined. Out of respect for the recipient family I will not go into details of why the application was declined.

Today we are going back to the clinic to view more profiles and start again. If you have reached thus far, thank you for taking the time to read about our journey!

We are seeking recipients for our embryos; we are open to finding a recipient family outside of the clinic. I’m going to put it out there; we would like to welcome a recipient family into our whanau, we would like to have a close(ish) relationship with our recipient whanau, my husband describes the relationship like being distant cousins. I can’t state how I want this relationship to work, as it has to be mutual. Our embryos will be your children, I don’t want to live your pocket, but I do want to have a strong and secure relationship with our chosen recipients.

If you have read to this point and you have similar values and we tick your box - please do reach out.

Aroha nui x
R&K