Helen shared her story with us as part of the #wouldntbehere campaign and has kindly now offered some very open and honest insight into the decision, feelings and emotions she felt towards using donor eggs.

“Our “Assisted Conception” journey spanned 12 years altogether with many twists and turns and we learnt so much with all the various tests and treatments that we were able to talk to the experts on a level pegging as we understood what they were talking about rather than feeling we were being blinded by science.

Because of this when we went through what was our final ICSI treatment in London we knew exactly what they were talking about when the consultant in London advised us that the Zona Pellucida on my eggs was now creating a hard shell which was making it somewhere between difficult and impossible for the embryologists to inject the sperm into them. I was 42 so I knew this was now a big problem and only going to get worse. Our consultant in London brought up the idea of egg donation and suggested we take some time to think about it.

It was really difficult to take the information on board. There are so many issues that crop up, prey on your mind and confuse you and it is quite a scary step. However we did a lot of research and it was suggested that there were extremely good clinics in Spain who were very experienced and specialised in Donor Assisted Conception.

During our journey over the previous 5 years, my husband and I had discussed our options on many occasions together and also with close family members who were really supportive. One of those options had been adoption. If we couldn’t have our own, would we adopt? The answer had always been yes, but if you go down that route it is actively discouraged until you have completed your assisted conception journey one way or another. So here we were in a bit of a limbo. Drawing up the plan of action we realised a number of things.

DNA isn’t everything and if we had moved on to adoption, neither of us would have been a genetic parent and if that didn’t matter then how could we say no to a donor egg?

In April 2012 we lost another pregnancy and started talking about our options and by the middle of July we had selected and contacted our new clinic in Madrid and were well on the way to being booked in for treatment. During our first consultation call with the consultant in Madrid she gave us a really good idea of how they go about finding a donor for you. We had to fill in a form with a lot of personal details about ourselves with height, skin colour and tone, eye colour, hair colour and type, shape of face etc and then they find a donor as close to those details as they can. They do take both sides into consideration too as it could either narrow or broaden their search accordingly.

In October 2012 we went through our first donor egg treatment. It felt no different to going through a Frozen Embryo Transfer apart from one thing for us. We FINALLY made it to blastocyst culture (the stage of development embryos hopefully reach by day 5 in the lab before being transferred)! For us this was epic and had never happened with any of my eggs/embryos. I had 2 embryos put back and we travelled home. 2 weeks later we got the news we’d always waited for. We were pregnant, and the hormone levels were really good and quite high. This wasn’t quite the end of our journey though as we sadly lost the pregnancy.

In 2013 we travelled twice for Frozen embryo transfers neither of which worked and 2014 we decided “one more time”. I hated the job I was doing at the time so I handed in my notice and decided I would look for something else after this round of treatment. All our planning was geared towards travelling to Madrid in May but as each day and week went by I was getting more agitated because they still hadn’t found the right donor for me. They wanted to take no chances it was only going to be the perfect donor.

Finally the news came that they had found one and we were all set to travel at the beginning of June. On my 44th birthday our wonderful anonymous angel donated 10 eggs all of which were successful embryos. As we had chosen to have Preimplantation Genetic Diagnosis tests done, 10 became 6, then 6 became 3 and one then stopped making progress and we were left with 2 amazing beautiful blastocysts. Those 2 little blastocysts became 2 little heart beats and at just 27 weeks and 5 days those 2 little heart beats made a rather early appearance as 2 beautiful little girls.

I was really nervous for a long time as everyone tried to work out who they looked like. Was it Daddy or was it Mummy? I occasionally got a little down about it while they were in the NeoNatal unit in Southampton but by the time we came back to Jersey Hospital I’d let it go. I simply didn’t care. I had 2 gorgeous girls and they were all ours! However, I was really taken back when people did start say “she looks just like you” and “she definitely looks like her Mummy”. If it hadn’t been for the fact that the comments tended to favour the same daughter, I’d have just assumed people were just being polite.

When the girls were 10 months old I was sent the most amazing article from a family friend who also happened to be a retired nurse. That article put the last tick in the box and the icing on the cake for me “Women Using Donor Eggs Can Pass on THEIR DNA to Baby”.

I read it. I cried with joy but mostly I cried tears of a fiercely proud Mummy who just loved her babies like any other Mummy does.

Donor Assisted Conception can be a difficult path to take and you need to really talk about it to shed any negatives you might have so that you can go into it with your eyes wide open. If you are on a journey and you don’t know which path to take, there will always be someone who has been down a similar road who can help to guide you or share a little of your burden.”