Jenny Suomalainen (name has been changed)
When we got married in 2012, I knew we might not be able to have a child. It didn’t stop me from wishing and hoping that we would. We had great trust in medical professionals.
We first visited Ovumia, or AVA-klinikka as it was known then, in the centre of Tampere ten years ago. I was 19 and my husband was 23 at the time.
We found out that my husband had poor-quality sperm. He was shocked and almost fainted. Luckily, there was nothing wrong with my fertility.
We went home to digest the information and to figure out what we wanted to do next. The doctor recommended that we first try to lower the oestrogen content in my husband’s system.
This was the gentlest alternative. If it didn’t work, I would have to start the hormone treatment required for in vitro fertilisation, or IVF.
Fear of needles and therapy
It didn’t bring us the result we wanted, and a few years passed. If we started IVF, I would have to inject hormones into my stomach. I thought a person with a fear of needles couldn’t manage that in a million years.
To top it all, I had a history of panic attacks. For a year, I saw a therapist to help me with these issues. Ovumia helped by arranging an opportunity for me to practise injecting myself with saline.
I was scared and backed down. I decided I just couldn’t do it. It was a nerve-racking time. My husband blamed himself too. He felt he wasn’t a good enough man because he wasn’t able to help me and I had to inject myself.
We had some couples therapy, and it took seven years before I was brave enough to even try the practice injections at Ovumia. In March 2017, we went to see psychotherapist Mirka Paavilainen.
My husband and his younger sister came along to support me when nurse Merja Ollila helped me with the first injections. We took it one day at a time from there.
It was a really painful time for us, but two weeks later I had injected the course of hormones needed into my stomach. I couldn’t have done it without the mental support of the Ovumia staff and being able to talk to them, or without my husband’s presence. My husband was there every evening when I injected myself.
Fresh egg donation brought instant success
We waited anxiously to find out the result. It turned out there were quite a lot of embryos, nine of them good quality. One of them was first class. It was used immediately in a fresh transfer, and then all we could do was hope.
In the end, everything went fairly smoothly, and the embryo grew into a healthy baby boy. Every time I talk about this it makes me cry. It’s a sore spot for us. This baby boy, our treasure, is the culmination of seven years of pain, failure and terrible guilt.
I’ve wondered many times during that time whether I’m strong enough to do this. Whether I’m brave enough or whether I will be disappointed once again.
I don’t know if we would ever have had a child together without all the support Ovumia provided. Their work is topnotch. They gave us hope and the chance to succeed. At the same time, they always told us everything clearly and were honest about the fact that they can’t make any promises.
Our doctor was Kati Pentti. My husband found it easy to go to the clinic and talk about his thoughts too. Childlessness touches the man as much as the woman. The hardest part for a man may be to find out that the fault lies with him.
Plans for a sibling
Our son turned three last December. He is a very lively and cheerful child. There is no way to measure the blessing we have received.
We have eight more frozen embryos waiting for us. If we wanted our son to have a sibling, that’s where we would start.
We were planning to try for another child last spring, but COVID19 hit our business quite hard. We are both entrepreneurs and didn’t want to start the baby project on top of everything else. I think it will become topical over the course of 2021.
The blog writer is a customer of Ovumia writing under a pseudonym.
Read more about fertility treatments in Ovumia
