KIRSTY AND KIM PRAISE INCLUSIVITY AT FERTILITY CLINIC

When Kimberley and Kirsty became a couple in spring 2022, Kim already had two daughters, now aged nine and five, from a previous relationship. But Kirsty knew from the start that she also wanted to have a baby and it would have been a deal-breaker for her if Kim hadn’t felt the same way.

Fortunately that wasn’t a problem: Kim was just as keen for the pair to have a baby of their own, and three years on they now have that baby, thanks to the miracle of IVF and the efforts of the team at Bristol Centre for Reproductive Medicine (BCRM).

Kirsty, a nurse associate at Musgrove Park, and Kim, who works in a tea-room in Taunton - the town where both women were born and raised - started investigating fertility clinics after they’d been together for about a year.

Kim said they picked BCRM because they were impressed with their track record, found them very informative and easy to deal with on the phone, and were happy with the way they put them at ease when they visited.

Kirsty said: “The plan was that I would be carrying the baby, and it was really important to us that all the staff at the clinic understood how we wanted to be looked after.

“They didn’t disappoint. At all our appointments people were friendly and reassuring, supportive when examinations were taking place and worked at just the right pace for us, offering an exceptional level of inclusivity for a same-sex couple.

“We used the sperm bank at BCRM: it was fun and quite interesting to browse the catalogue of donors to find someone who ticked all our boxes.

“We were looking for a donor whose baby photos showed him to have physical traits which gave us hope that a baby with his genes might also resemble one of us, and we were also looking for someone with a history that chimed with us.

“Finally, we found our perfect donor. He has an olive complexion, details offered of family and health history were fine for us, we even approved of his hobbies and travels, and we were able to listen to a recording of his voice – all good.

“The next step was to have a session with one of the clinic’s counsellor and treatment support therapists. We had our reservations about needing that, but were actually really glad we’d gone after we’d chatted with her.

“It was a very positive and thought-provoking session, covering subjects as diverse as what names we wanted the baby to call us by in due course, and how to enlighten others about the altruistic motives that drive sperms donors.

“We had multiple trips to the clinic, so we were grateful that access and parking are easy. At one point I was needing to attend up to four times a week for internal scans to check my ovaries were growing!

“Usually this takes seven to 10 days, but there were a few issues with me and instead it took nearly three weeks. I also required a more intensive drug regimen than normal and it was all quite stressful ensuring the timing was right.

“So retrieving my eggs proved challenging, but the BCRM team got there in the end and retrieved 10 eggs, of which three were viable and two were successfully fertilised and became blastocysts - those amazing balls of cells which can eventually develop to become embryo and placenta.

“Thereafter I had normal IVF treatment.

“We had one of the blastocysts transplanted, and one frozen.

“The transfer process was just lovely. Kim and I held hands and could see the whole process happening on the monitor.

“The two-week wait until we could do a pregnancy test to find out whether everything had worked was really, really hard, but we resisted the temptation to test early because that can provide inaccurate results.

“I was fairly confident the IVF had worked: I had symptoms like morning sickness and tender breasts, but the wait was mentally draining.

“On the day the two weeks were up we awoke at 3am but waited until 5am to test. I did two tests and they both turned blue at the same time. We were ecstatic!

“We hadn’t told anyone else about our IVF journey to start with, apart from one friend who had a baby through BCRM years ago, so it was lovely when we could go public.

“My pregnancy was a bit of a bumpy ride. I have Crohn’s Disease, which complicated matters somewhat, although I did everything I could to stay healthy, and the baby was always fine.

“Our beautiful daughter, Willow Dot, was born at Musgrove Park Hospital on 16 June weighing 7lb 9oz, and we couldn’t be prouder parents. She is amazing.

“We will be forever grateful to the team at BCRM who made it possible for Kim and I to have our own little girl, and for the modern miracle that is IVF.”

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