Did anyone mention your weight to you before?

The initial referring consultant said, he didn’t say to me that, he just said to me, As you are a bit over weight it is a little bit less likely that any treatment we will do, will be successful. But it wouldn’t stop you having any treatment. You see. And it did.

So and I knew I must have been, I have been overweight all my life, so I knew that it wasn’t anything, it wasn’t a new story, I knew that if they asked me to lose weight. I knew it was going to be a long time before I would be able to, you know, I had lost weight once before and it took over a year to do that. So therefore, again it was all about delays and all about can’t start it. And I think the fact that I couldn’t. If they had said to me, We are not going to let you do it now, but we will let you do it in two months. That would have been all right. But what they said was, No. We won’t accept you. And at that point I thought that was the only route to get to it.

So I thought that was the only route but it wasn’t the only route but at the time the door was just being slammed in my face and that was terrible. Because I then thought I had a year to lose weight, you know, and all this time was creeping on. I am getting on for 30 odd and you do feel that clock is really ticking. We are back to numbers again but that is true, the clock felt that it was really ticking.

And so you then went to see another clinic?

Yes.

And had IVF? Open cycle with them. Which resulted in

Which resulted, one was it was sort of two really because one was a no starter because of no eggs. And the second one that didn’t fertilise. So that was sort of like two goes, but one was a non starter and the second one was and then because it was a fairly local clinic, I thought, at that point, when it failed, I thought I wasn’t getting the right treatment. So you are looking elsewhere then. For the best treatment. You want the best, you want the best, you know. And then it was the process by which we could get the best because we didn’t have any money. So they would, you know, they paid bet sort of thing, you know. That is why we went to the third place really.

Did it feel like a real struggle?

Absolutely. Agony. It was awful. He was ringing at work all the time. He was ringing daily and this was like, this was a bit of a vendetta mission-type thing, you know. It was the fact that we were entitled to it, we were entitled to another go of IVF definitely because the first one of the two, at the local clinic didn’t count. So we had that agreed. And we were thinking of strategies all the time. You know, thinking what can we say to them. And what we actually said in the end was, what he said to them was, Look if, you know, at the point they were thinking of funding more than two and all this. Is it not in your interest to give us the more expensive treatment in a good place and we won’t come back to you for another IVF. Because if we have another IVF it is probably going to fail. That is where we were at. They were thinking of all these ideas trying to but he was, it was a, we go like power from nowhere in our minds. We were just on it all the time. Because we felt like it was a right. And it was a right that we should be allowed to have the opportunity to try and be parents, you know. It really was. You felt a bit political about it. And I am not really political at all really either. But you did feel that that was an inherent humanright, to be allowed to do what is the right treatment for you. Because they said to us, There is every likelihood of these place where the two failed. Your likelihood is ICSI is your best bet. We don’t do it. You know, so where do we get it done and they agreed that probably we needed more specialist treatment then they were able to give. So therefore everything pointed to this place, but to get to it was agony because it was not really within the catchment area, it wasn’t within their defined tertiary referral. There was all that about it, and then they had to have a special board to talk about us. And that in itself, you didn’t need it, we didn’t need it. All we wanted them to say was, yes that is fine. But we had to give evidence, we didn’t go and give it, we had to write a letter to say why we wanted it, and why we thought ICSI was the best and ever such hard work, ever such hard work.

So it was agony of months and months and months of agony. Trying to get, and again the months of waiting were waiting and time was ticking again.

So again back up on the horse really and we just wanted to get on with it. We were desperate, absolutely desperate to have our family, so we got back up on the horse, and [wife] went to the doctor and the doctor said yes, you comply with all the guidelines laid down by NICE for NHS funding, but when he actually went to put us forward they realised that our local PCT had introduced some additional guidelines that rendered us ineligible.

The one that really I think got was the fact that we had privately funded treatment historically, retrospectively they had brought a guideline in and they penalised people for something they’d done retrospectively. I just can’t understand how you can exclude somebody for something because of something they did before you set the rules, before you laid those rules down. And it turned out if we had spent the money on gambling or a holiday or a car or something, if we’d been frivolous with the money and said, Okay the NHS will help us when we’re read they’d have funded us. But because we had tried to take to take the burden off the NHS by funding ourselves they then penalised us for it. And I think, today struggle with that, how they can see that’s fair?

While it all happened, it did cause a hell of a lot of stress. More so on Karen’s part because I saw it as a money saving exercise rather than her well being, but she was happy to do that at the time as well. But as we got into it we felt we werelied to, the truth wasn’t told, Karen they had said she would be on the drugs for four weeks. She landed up with about six or seven weeks on the drugs. The lady, oh we’ve got a lady, then it sounded like they didn’t have a lady. There was conflicting information coming every time. And obviously, you know, they say one thing and your mind just goes off at a tangent. Thinking well is it true? Are they saying what they say they’re saying? they’re a private business. They are in it for the money. Get you in. Get you out. Next in.

And, the sum total of it was it caused a hell of a lot of stress. The egg was put back. But while the egg was put back, it wasn’t inserted – well it was inserted but the egg appeared to be sitting outside of the syringe so they had to have another go. So whether that was part of it, or because of the stress that was going on and her body not coping, it was a failure in the end. So she didn’t have a positive pregnancy.

At the time, after all of this had kicked off, and we are absolutely sorry to the people who we let down in the end, because of it. Because obviously they’d been waiting a long time to get eggs from, healthy eggs from somebody and we eventually withdrew consent.

So it was awful on both sides. But because of the stress that it had caused, Karen was not happy. I wasn’t happy as the time went on. I was all for it in the beginning. There was, you know, we’d agreed to help somebody else, and as reality started setting it, it’s then when it actually struck us.

So, the whole experience was awful. Plus the amount of time Karen was on the drugs. She got very bad tempered with me. Everything was my problem, not her own, and that was just the hormones and everything kicking in. So I tried to take some of it on, but at the same time it did cause us to fight with each other, and any way, as time went on.

So we stopped. We had to wait for her to come off the drugs, get it through her system, and then we thought right forget it, we are going to go somewhere else.

We went to have a look at another place and it was an NHS, but you could go in as a private patient. So we looked at that on the internet and they had a very good reputation, a very good success rate, so we thought fair enough, yes, we’ll go and have a look at this place. And I said, If I go for the initial evening and I don’t like it, I’m not coming back I said, Do you understand? We will look for somewhere else, until, you know, we’re happy

But the initial, even the initial consultation, was great, answered so many more questions. I could sit there and think, now that’s why they did that, or that’s why they did that. They answered the questions from before that I’d never got answers to. Made me feel completely at ease. Told me we could ask as many questions as we want. We could ring and ask questions if we were feeling unsure at home. The counsellor was on standby most of the time. But if you rung and said before you came there, they’d make sure someone was available to speak to you. You know, or if you said on the day that you were struggling, you might have to wait, but somebody would eventually come and speak to you and sort things out for you. And it was just, and they explained all the drugs to me on that night, This is what you’ll be taking And, This is why you are going to take this. And then we’ll give you this and this is why. And this is what this is going to help you do. This is going to help relax you on the day when you come in to have your egg collection. And they explained absolutely everything. And it was a much, from the outset it was a much nicer experience.