Since having IVF I now dread October as I know it's when we get 'The letter' then one asking us what we want to do with our 2 remaining frozen embro's. We were very lucky the 1st 2 years as we had storage included within our treatment.
This year though was different, the letter came from Oxford and unlike the previous years there was now a cost to store the embro's which meant we had to finally decide what we wanted to do.
Our options
1. store them for another yr cost of £290
2. Let them perish
3. Donate to another couple
4. Donate to science
Before the letter had come hubby and I had talked about it knowing that we'd probably have to pay this year. We had already decided we're not going to have any more children and that we didn't just want to let them perish So that left us 2 choices. Although I thought we'd go with option 4 we decided that we wanted to explore option 3 a little more.
Option 3 - donate them to another couple would mean the opportunity for another couple to have a baby, but what would it mean for us?
* Another couple would have our biological child and James brother or sister
* We would have to go for further tests before we could donate
* We would have to go for counselling
* We could never find out any more than the yr of birth of that child and the sex
* James would never be able to search for his brother or sister
* At 16 that child could find out more information about us
* At 18 that child could find us if they wanted
* If that child ever got taken into care for any reason we would never be told
After a long hard think over a bit of wine we decided that was not an option for us mainly due to the fact James would never be able to find his brother or sister and the tests and counselling we'd had to go through in the beginning.
So that left us only 1 option - donate to science. Oxford are currently doing research into why perfectly good embryos don't implant into the womb. So our embryos will go into that research and actually instead of helping just 1 couple they could help towards helping lots of couples!
