After Alex’s death, I assumed I would automatically morph into the character from the Scottish Widows advert – the wind blowing her black hooded garment. She’s strong, she’s alone and she’s loaded. But when my partner died, I was absolutely skint having spent the best part of £80,000 trying to have a baby, using the equity from my flat, which had gone up in value after the property boom.
What was I meant to do now? Give up? After all Alex had done to help make this possible, could I really throw the last living piece of his DNA away? It turns out that having his children after his death was not that simple to orchestrate – emotionally or logistically.
I was still reeling from the shock of Alex taking his own life – and losing my soul mate – and mourning the dream of growing old and grey together. Still, days later, I was down at a London IVF clinic checking out the legalities of having a dead man’s child. Luckily, the IVF doctor returned to confirm that I had the go-ahead after checking the paperwork.
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Feeling very emotional, I announced the joyful news to his family that there was no barrier to having his children, despite his death. I don’t think his mum really believed it was going to happen – even though she is a doting grandmother these days. Why would anybody think it was going to happen? Was I mad? This was my tenth attempt. Was I becoming an IVF addict? One is too many and a thousand is not enough as they say in Alcoholics Anonymous. It certainly felt unmanageable and like I was gambling with my life savings.
Once I came out of the operating theatre and woke up to be told they had not retrieved any eggs. Luckily, the general anaesthetic had not worn off and I was still numb. Another time I waited for a phone call to hear about the embryos’ welfare, asking the lab assistant to give them a kiss from me, only to be told they were all duds.
I was on the merry-go-round of one negative pregnancy test after another – when was this going to stop? I went to a top doctor, the former royal gynaecologist who cost a fortune, to review my plan of action. He told me that my progesterone levels were so high that even a top-grade embryo wouldn’t have thrived if implanted. But exactly why were they so high, especially when the levels deplete as you age, was a mystery to the doctors, who started to run some tests. Nothing was going my way it seemed but I kept on going.
I knew it was going to be hard, aged 40, with my fertility falling off a cliff, but with the added fear of running out of sperm, the idea of having Alex’s children became even more elusive. Given the situation could go on for years, some genius lab person came up with the idea that we wouldn’t need to use a whole sample during an IVF round and could get the mini icepick out to chisel away at my potential future, taking little bits at a time. But soon the financial burden became too much: I needed to get treatment in Europe, where IVF and the medication was, shockingly, half the price.
Wondering why this was the case and starting to think that IVF was a huge con by the pharmaceutical companies to exploit women at their most vulnerable time, I started to lose all confidence in it.
I finally was granted permission by the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, the police force of sperm and eggs, to take his sperm and some of my eggs to Spain. I was really happy when I heard that his sperm had reached the sunny shores of Alicante and went to the clinic for a day to meet the doctors, packing a suitcase with my shades and suncream, even spending a few hours on the local Costa Blanca beach.
Meanwhile, it turned out that some unlicensed fertility supplements I was on from America – which supposedly improved egg quality, and called the fountain of youth – were raising my progesterone levels through the roof. No doctor had spotted this until an IVF buddy by accident told me she had been told to stop taking them. This was a game changer.
But then I got another shock: I was told I had to get Alex’s sperm out of Alicante immediately because the law in Spain states that it can only be kept for a year after a partner’s death. In a total panic that they were going to bin my future children, I called around different clinics in the US, Cyprus – even Croatia – to find them a safe haven. It is quite complicated explaining that I wanted to transport a dead man’s sperm, especially as we were not married. It was even harder to get a birth certificate at Chelsea Town Hall with his name on it – instead of it taking 20 minutes – it took weeks.
It turned out that Russia was the cheapest place and I had always wanted to go to St Petersburg anyway – America was just too far away.
I remember the night Alex’s sperm and my eggs travelled to Russia. It was an edge-of-your-seat nerve-wracking time. When Serge from Russia turned up in Alicante to collect them from the clinic, the paperwork was still not ready. That night I was at a press screening in London of Macbeth, starring Michael Fassbender. I fainted dramatically in front of the cinema screen.
The film’s PR dragged me out by my legs. She thought it was because the battle scenes were too violent. She sat me down with a glass of water, and then I got the text from “Sperm Serge” (as he is entered in my phone): “Made it. We are in Moscow. Will take sperm to St Petersburg in morning.”