I guess our choices boil down to the following: try PGD a fourth time (£9k/$15k), try egg donation (around the same cost as PGD, possibly more, whether we do it here in the UK or aboard), adoption or do nothing at all. And I guess there is trying naturally again and hoping we beat (my very poor) odds. None of these options is easy. I guess I/we are moving more towards egg donation as the most realistic chance of us having a family. In the UK, egg donation is non-anonymous, meaning the child is entitled to trace their donor when they are old enough. But elsewhere in Europe, such as Spain, it is totally anonymous, and the child will never be able to trace their donor.
How do I feel about all of this? To be honest, I'm quite tired of the whole thing. The past few years have been very gruelling and I'm quite exhausted just thinking about it all. Our three PGDs didn't work for one reason or another, and I don't think it's an unusual experience. In the same vein, there's been a small flurry of articles about the impact of IVF when it doesn't work, which I thought were interesting:
Five million babies have been born thanks to IVF. But few people talk of the many more times the treatment doesn't work, says Lisa Jardine, the departing chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24652639
A recent Magazine article by Lisa Jardine about the frequency with which In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) fails prompted readers to send in their own experiences.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24725655
There may be five million IVF success stories, but for many millions more women, the treatments have failed. So why do we never hear from them?
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/sep/27/ivf-where-all-grief-going
