Causes & Treatment

Proof of Hope – Jackie’s TTC Story

Eloise Edington | 27 Dec 2019

Jackie shares her personal trying to conceive journey, and why, no matter how hard it may be, you should always have hope.

Our trying to conceive journey

I’m Jackie and I’m 35 years old. In February last year, I finally gave birth to a healthy baby boy.

Four years ago, my husband and I received the news that he had zero sperm count. After trying to conceive for a year with no luck, my husband went to get his sperm checked. We didn’t think too much about it but when it came back – twice – as zero, we were devastated.

@jackie_kenyon

I had various blood tests too. I can’t remember exactly what they checked, but everything on my side came back as normal. I’d always had regular periods so I did feel quite confident that all was good in the ovaries etc…

We were referred for ICSI straight away and in 2016, just before our wedding, we went through our first round of IVF on the NHS. My husband had a procedure and luckily they were able to extract sperm from his testicles so we didn’t need to think about a sperm donor. We were really excited and we felt so confident that this would be it; we’d be pregnant after all. How naive…

After a pretty straightforward round of IVF, six eggs being extracted and five fertilising, we went and had two blastocyst embryos transferred. After our TWW (two week wait), we went and had a blood test done at the clinic; they said I needed to call them back at midday. My husband and I both went back to work. When I phoned, the result was negative. We were told the next day that none of the embryos was good enough to freeze.

We had our second round a few months later after we got married. It was our last free go on the NHS. I had some more blood tests to check my thyroid levels etc. All came back normal. I also asked if I could have a scratch, which they did. We had another straightforward cycle and twelve eggs were retrieved. We had two embryos put back in on Day 3.

Again after our TWW our blood test came back negative. We then paid for our third round, still through the NHS. Again, similar results: eggs retrieved, two put back in on Day 5, and the test came back negative.

We had a break for about a year and decided to go to a private clinic, where straight away they said that something must be wrong, as it’s not just down to bad luck that I never even got pregnant- as everything else seemed normal with me. They suggested that I have a blood test to check the levels of my natural killer cells.

It was very expensive and my bloods were sent to Chicago. When the results came back, my natural killer cell levels were slightly high, so we decided to have intralipid infusions to dampen them down. We had one intralipid infusion during my cycle, one just after I found out I was pregnant and then another one after that.

My pregnancy was great and my little boy is perfect. We also have 4 frozen embryos which I think could be down to the fact that they over stimulated me, so we had to wait an extra two days for my egg retrieval (the cycle had nearly got cancelled). I’m certain that those extra couple of days had allowed my eggs to mature that little bit more, which meant that four out of the six that were retrieved could be frozen and one turned out to be my little boy. We got there in the end.