Special Mother’s Day for Bourn Hall grandmother

Infertility wasn’t something that was discussed when Angela was struggling to have a baby in the 1980s, and IVF was not available as a treatment through the NHS in Bedfordshire. It was fortunate that she had heard about Bourn Hall from her cousin Jenny, who had become a nurse at the clinic.

“When I was 21 my appendix had burst, and I had got all these adhesions from the peritonitis, but I didn’t know that was the reason I wasn’t getting pregnant. It wasn’t until I actually had the twins by caesarean that the doctor told me ‘there is no way you would have conceived naturally’.”

The twins were both healthy, but there was a delay before daughter Nikki started her periods – she didn’t have her first one until she was 17.

Nikki remembers: “My mum had first taken me to the doctor when I was 16 because she suspected something must be wrong with my hormones. When I started getting one period a year at 17 the GP said, ‘well, obviously something is happening’ and it wasn’t investigated any further at that point.”

“As I already had a child we were not entitled to any NHS-funded fertility treatment beyond the hospital stage and so we started looking into our options of having fertility treatment privately. My mum said to me ‘Go to Bourn Hall, they are brilliant!’”

Nikki and Liam went for an appointment at Bourn Hall and assumed that they would also have IVF.

“The doctor suggested that we try one or two cycles of IUI because I was young and Liam’s sperm quality was good. It is a lot less invasive and cheaper than IVF,” says Nikki.

Dr Thanos Papathanasiou, Bourn Hall’s Medical Director, says a couple should seek advice if they have been trying for two years without success, as being younger offers more options for treatment, with IVF being the last resort.

Nikki continues: “With IUI you still have to inject medication like you do with IVF. I injected every day while my eggs were maturing; in fact sometimes my sister Becky did my injections for me, which was nice.

“I went into Bourn Hall for regular scans, before one final trigger injection which released an egg, and then we had a window of time when I needed to go back into Bourn Hall for the IUI.

“The actual IUI involved a fine straw being inserted into the entrance to my womb and then the sperm being injected in. It is the most ‘natural’ form of fertility treatment really. The staff at Bourn Hall had to guide the sperm in so the nurse put an ultrasound on my belly, and the doctor was working the straw to make sure the sperm got as far up as it could to swim up the fallopian tube.

Sadly, the couple’s initial round of IUI failed. “When I got my period it was just awful, really upsetting and I wasn’t sure if I could really face starting again, injecting again every day and the pressure of it, but in the end, we decided to go back for another try pretty quickly.”