Our psychologist Dorota recently received a touching letter from a patient who has gone through a bumpy road of treatment. She is currently waiting for her little happiness to come into the world any moment now. She decided to share her story to give encouragement to those who, like her, were once told "you have a 5 per cent chance of having a baby".

I am a person who has struggled with infertility for 3 years. During treatment, my husband and I needed psychological support and that is how we came to you for the workshop.

When the whole infertility 'adventure' began we were both in our 30s and did not assume, like other patients, that things could go wrong. Getting pregnant was supposed to be easy, simple and pleasant. Unfortunately, it became apparent quite quickly that the situation was serious and on both sides. Firstly, it turned out that my husband had very poor semen quality making natural conception absolutely impossible. So we moved from seeing a standard gynaecologist to a specialist clinic. I also started to get tested at the clinic, just in case, and in a few months, after receiving the result of the AMH test, it turned out that... the situation was quite dramatic. AMH equal to 0.2, which for me meant a low number of egg cells and of poor quality. The chances of a successful IVF procedure dropped for us to roughly 5%. We had turned from two young people in the prime of life into a couple over the course of months who would probably never have biological children of their own. That 5% accompanied me every day, every morning and night for the next year. We fell into a fervour of treatment. The doctor in charge chose the most promising method of insemination for us on a natural cycle, which meant that every month I came for ovarian monitoring hoping that this time the follicle with the oocyte would grow to such a size that a cell could be retrieved. Of course this did not go easily. Sometimes there was a cyst and it had to be treated first with medication, which prolonged the wait by another month, sometimes the follicle did not grow as expected, sometimes the date for the cell retrieval fell on a Sunday when the clinic is closed and the follicle was gone on Monday. And every month was huge hopes, huge anticipation and tension, huge mood work to be in good shape to have this pregnancy and at the same time growing tired. Rushing to the clinic several times each month for some odd hours in the middle of the day, explaining things at work. You know, you told us all about it yourself, we are all sick stuck in the same way....

I know that taking hormone stimulation must be very difficult, it's pricking several times a day.... However, I also think that the stabbing, and knowing that I will have 8 oocytes thanks to this, that is 8 chances of fertilisation, and from this at least a few embryos, and not to have anything certain, not a single cell, not to be able to go out of the changing room into the field all the time, is incomparable. I would personally prefer a thousand times the physical pain, the battered body, to this mental pain, this fog I lived in for so many months when nothing else mattered but getting pregnant. The quintessence of all this was the puncture, during which no oocyte was found in the follicle. I mean, I let myself be put on the table, anaesthetised, pricked, paid a lot of money for this procedure, mentally prepared myself for it for a few days, only to be told later, lying under a green blanket, that "the embryologist looked, but there was no oocyte". This was probably the most difficult experience of the whole treatment. It meant that there was nothing certain, just an abyss, a black hole of uncertainty.

In the course of a year's treatment, we were able to obtain an oocyte once, which we managed to fertilise, but I did not become pregnant. After that it was a string of failures. In the end, the doctor said that he suggested one more attempt and then other solutions. This other solution was to be prenatal oocyte adoption. A seemingly simple matter. Especially for someone like me - an atheist, liberal-minded person from a big city, who doesn't give a damn about blood ties. My husband quickly accepted this solution. I said I was open to it too, just to have a family, just to be pregnant. However, as the days went by, the thought pressed on a little bit, it was like a shoe that was too small. It is, however, adopting someone else's cellphone, a great responsibility. It's adopting someone else's child in 50 %. No one will have my eyes or my hair anymore. No one in the world. However, humans have this strange selfish need to pass on genes... Even a liberal like me! So I thought I needed to somehow get over it, to say goodbye to my own fertility, to separate the treatment stage from the adoption stage. And this is where we met, because I felt I needed your help. We only met once at InviMed for a private appointment. We called everything that had happened. You helped me arrange in my head that now it was time for prenatal adoption, how to treat it, how to say goodbye to my own fertility. We laid it all out. It was only an hour of conversation, but I felt relieved, I felt free and ready for this new unusual solution of having a child. I even thought about coming back to you if new questions arose as things started to happen... For the next few weeks, I stopped this reel in which we ran like two hamsters just living from test to test. I just got out of it, because now I will be a social mum. Nothing worse can happen now than what has happened. I no longer have to fight against time running out, against the spectre of impending menopause. When the donor cell arrives, I will take it in and love it as my own.

And then something unbelievable happened. I had that one more promised appointment ahead of me, that one more attempt the doctor had mentioned. On the table at the doctor's office lay the half-signed papers for cell adoption. All that was missing was my husband's signature and the wait for a donor was about to begin. In the meantime, the doctor examined me and found a follicle. Well, he says, please come in two days. So I'll come. In two days' time, the follicle turned out to be a perfect follicle and the doctor scheduled an LP for Saturday. My husband couldn't believe it, what do you mean, an LP? Just like that? On Saturday at the procedure it was like a movie. Everyone was in perfect humour, my favourite anaesthetist was cracking jokes and the doctor was telling everyone in the treatment room how we compared our situation to not being able to get out of the changing room onto the pitch. The instrument ladies said that it would definitely work out now, that I would still come for another baby... And I cried from all this sitting on the table in my shirt and said through my tears: okay, I'll come. They managed to retrieve the oocyte and combine it with my dear husband's brave sperm. In three days' time they called that there was an embryo. I took the embryo to myself, because where would he be better off, right? I didn't want to get my hopes up, physically I didn't feel any different, I assumed it was unlikely to happen. After 12 days I went to get my beta result and there it was...300! I think we are pregnant, I call my husband. Just to be sure at home, I did a urine test so that it was at least a little normal, a little human. Two lines! We are pregnant! Impossible! For a very long time we didn't believe it had happened. In the meantime I got sick with the flu, I was very afraid of losing the pregnancy. Nothing like having one chance in life to have a baby and getting the flu! But the baby kept a firm grip on me. Subsequent tests came out correctly. The heart was beating, the baby had arms and legs, it was wiggling its hind legs! The genetic tests proved to be correct. After all, you have to be a very strong person to rise to the occasion! And today... it's 32 weeks pregnant, and those 5 % chances of pregnancy are a girl named Julia. Juliet is due to be born at the end of September, so I'm talking to her not to go anywhere sooner, she's sitting in her belly at her mum's until that date, because she still needs to grow a bit and gain body. As I write to you, my belly is rippling and Julka is kicking me in the ribs and in the bladder. Sweet weight!

I would like to thank you very much for the support that the workshops with you gave us. I feel that it made us stronger, that it gave us the wisdom to survive in this extreme situation. Through this experience, but also through working with you, we were a better support for each other, we became a better team than we were before..before the illness.

Thank you also for the one one-on-one conversation we had. It allowed me to put everything in my head, to realise the readiness of being a social mum. No one knows and no one will ever know what happened that suddenly made everything take off, that it worked out so well with my own gametes... I, as a rationalist who only believes in medicine, was very surprised by it all, but it seems that I had to clear my psyche to make it all work. I had to stop the gears in the reel. So the head is very important in the whole healing process though, and this story of ours is just proof of that!

I wish you all the best and, of course, satisfaction with your work, because it is extremely necessary and valuable. I am sure that you will help many more people suffering from infertility. I also hope that maybe this story shared, for example, during your workshops or in direct therapy with a patient, will help someone and give them hope and strength to fight.

My warmest greetings to you. Please keep your fingers crossed for us that Julka will be born whole and healthy.

Good luck and so humanly speaking..all the best in your daily life!

Dorota