When it takes a village to make a child – our new journey through egg donation and surrogacy
Writing or talking about the after-maths of cancer and how it affected our ability of having a family has been difficult, because it involves so many emotions. It feels like I am opening a Pandora’s Box, and I am not sure if I will be able to hold on to hope like Pandora did. It brings up excitement but fear and anxiety as we navigate complex and unexplored paths that intersect biology, medicine, psychology and law, combined with the need of a lot of kindness and generosity from others that are required for us to complete our little family.
If you haven’t been following my blog, let me briefly introduce myself – hi, my name is Fran and I am a medical researcher :-) I consider myself a walking miracle: 4 years ago I was diagnosed with advanced ovarian cancer. At only 31 years of age, I had no choice but to let go of both of my ovaries, uterus and other ‘non-essential’ body parts, so I could survive the beast. Two surgeries were followed by 5 months of chemotherapy, a lot of tears and hope that I would be okay. Even though the statistics were against me (ie, 36% chance of surviving 5 years), I am now not only alive, but also cancer-free! Hooray!!!
My husband Ian, back then my boyfriend, has always been incredibly supportive and even shaved his head when I lost my hair so I wouldn’t feel isolated. After I went into remission, we took baby steps and finally were able to commit to big stuff like other couples of our age: we got married, bought a dog, bought a house, bought another dog… We are happy and very grateful that we have each other’s support and love. But we always thought we would have one child. Now having both reached 35 and having stable careers (and, importantly, being so close to the 5 year cancer-free mark), we started looking into options for completing our family. We knew it was not going to be easy, but last week after we saw an IVF specialist, we learnt that things are a bit more complicated that even we expected… We had frozen my healthy ovarian tissue in hope to re-implant it one day and get eggs, but the IVF specialist told us this option is no longer available as a patient in a similar situation developed cancer again recently. And, understandably, nobody wants me to have cancer again.
They say that it takes a village to raise a child. In our case, it will take a village to make a child. What usually takes two people, in our case will take (at least) four to make as I can't produce eggs nor carry our future child. To make things more complicated, legally we are not allowed to advertise (so, by the way, this is not an ad), and according to Australia and Victoria’s laws both egg donation and surrogacy need to be altruistic, meaning that we can’t pay anyone to do it for us like in the USA, we can only reimburse them for their medical expenses, travel and other reasonable costs.
As a good researcher, in the past week I have been trying to read lots to understand the processes involved. I was fortunate to find amazing support groups on Facebook who are full of wonderful people who gave us a lot of comfort saying it is still possible to have a family, and shared their successful stories with us, some that took more than a decade. I was amazed by their courage, persistence and kindness to share some of the most intimate and difficult moments of their lives with a complete stranger. While the task to find an egg donor and a surrogate while navigating the legal and medical regulations still feels overwhelming, today I feel grateful for all the people who took time to tell me it is okay to grief the loss of my genes in our future baby, and that the road ahead won’t be a straight one, but that they are living examples of the generosity of human kind and the miracle of life!
Wishing you much health and love xx
Fran
