Egg Donor Patient Video: Catherine and Gavin

Catherine: You know the best I had hoped for was to have one child, at this late stage in my life, so to have two is more than a dream come true.

Gavin: Archie and Freddie, very different characters.

Catherine: Archie is very driven, physically.

Gavin: His character is summed up by his hair, which is wild.

Catherine: Freddie is a thinker.

Gavin: You know, if it’s a case of putting a block into a hole, Archie will be there trying to push it through, brute force. Freddie will come along, he’ll just look, he’ll just take it, and tweak it and just push it through.

Catherine: You get a lot of people saying double trouble, but actually it is double the joy.

Catherine: When I met Gavin, very early on he told me he had a vasectomy, but we were quite prepared to have that reversed and see where we were. We got married, didn’t get pregnant, and because of my age and the fact that Gavin had had a reversal, we wanted to go and get tested and see where things lay basically. So we did that locally at a clinic, and I was told that my quality of the eggs were very, very low, so there was very little chance of getting pregnant, which was the last thing I was expecting, because you just expect as a woman to be able to have children, and never having being tested before, it was a big shock. I found that probably very, very upsetting.

Gavin: I sort of witnessed, understandably, the heartache, the upset, the sorrow.

Catherine: Gavin saw the fertility show being advertised on the Sunday show and so we literally got on the train and came to the show that day.

Gavin: Because you put a lot of investment, both financial and emotional into doing this, you want to actually believe that the person that’s treating you and overseeing your treatment believes in it as well

Catherine: Talking to Amanda and the staff we just had a faith that these are really good people and they know what they’re talking about.

Gavin: They weren’t pushy, there were no promises made, it was more a case of look, this is us, we’ve had all of this success.

Catherine: I think what blew us away at the seminar was the statistics that they were coming out with and the research to back it up, and it just made me feel full of hope. And going over to the states they were nothing but lovely and accommodating, so it’s not just going to a sterile clinic at all, it’s going to a place that’s very warm and caring.

Gavin: There is never a chance through any legal channel that the donor could ever have contact.

Catherine: So you did feel that you got a lot of information about the donor, you know all of their medical history.

Gavin: You get to see photos of the donor as a child.

Catherine: You can read about their likes and dislikes, what their hobbies are, what their strengths and weaknesses are. There are times like when we were at the counseling, I did feel very upset that they wouldn’t be my eggs, they would feel like my children, but I carried them for seven and a half months, I fed them, I look after them every day, they want me, I am their mommy, so I do feel an amazing connection to them and I heard recently that there’s research in South Hampton that saying that they actually do have some DNA from the mother that carries them in the womb. The love that you feel for them is greater than anything that you can imagine.

Gavin: There is hope. You’ve got to do it with a team that believes that they can achieve a result for you, and a team that is going to support you and we had that from Shady Grove.

Catherine: You know you’ve given it your best chance if you go to Shady Grove.