Normally our IVF clinic works with a delivery company that delivers the medication for IVF to your home. However, they won’t deliver internationally, so we requested that we’d get the medication through our clinic at the last visit. Which seemed like a brilliant plan! …Until after our treatment appointment we’re handed a plastic shopping bag full of needles and vials.
It’s at that moment that I fully realise that this isn’t going to be a modest little bit of medication; this is a cartload of it.
And I need to take it with me back to Belgium through Eurostar security.
After spending the night in a terrible hostel and getting up ridiculously early for our anaesthesiology appointment, we’re off to the ABC clinic in Harley Street. We have a ‘treatment appointment’, which means we’re getting all the details sorted out for the IVF cycle to come.
It’s much busier this time than last time we were there. Jo and I sit in-between three other couples, the eight of us filling up the small waiting room.
I can’t help but notice that they’re all straight couples. The women meet our eyes and smile quickly. Their husbands generally look a lot shiftier sitting there, which strikes me as funny. We all know why we’re here, don’t we? I mentally wish them luck with their various scans and baby plans. I hope we’re all lucky…
Despite the crowd, we are seen with only a twenty minute delay, by the same people we saw last time.
We are happy going with the ABC fertility clinic, we have decided on a donor and the donor sperm has already arrived at the clinic, so we need to do just one final day in London with various appointments to get everything sorted.
Because our first appointment is at the crack of dawn, we stay overnight in a cheap hostel just by St Paul’s Cathedral. It smells musty inside our little room. The carpet is dirty. We have small metal bunk beds that squeak whenever we turn. There are no towels, so I dry myself after a quick foray into the disgusting shower with a bed sheet. It’s sort of funny. It’s terrible.
I can hear the bells of the cathedral ring all through night. After the early morning alarm we get ready in the dark, and when we step outside it is still dark and raining.
Our appointment is in a huge skyscraper in the City of London, smack-dab in the middle of the banking district. We take the lift down to the basement, and end up on an actual clinic recovery ward – it’s all little cubicles with treatment benches.
This is where I will be after my surgery. Read more
It comes down to two donors.
Two potential fathers for our – at this point entirely imaginary – child.
It makes me feel as if I am choosing between two possible children. One with that glint in their eye, one with the nice smile. They’ll be so very different, how are we meant to decide this?
We struggled with Bourn Hall fertility clinic the first time we went there, and we continued to struggle with them for months after. They sent us the wrong bills. They refused to quote us a total cost for the treatment there. They didn’t respond to emails. They seemed scattered, uninformative, uninterested, and 100% out for the money.
So we agreed to do just one more. One more clinic to visit on the off chance that they were better, and then we’d have to make a final decision.
Enter ABC IVF!
