Tuesday 26 May 2015

Maternal love does not care “whose EGG” “whose SPERM” !!

                              


This is the story of my patient  Rebecca, (name changed) whose journey to motherhood has enlightened me that motherly love knows no restrictions. She was suffering from severe vaginismus, a physical or psychological condition that makes it almost impossible for a woman to have vaginal penetration, sexual intercourse,  gynecological examinations requiring penetration.

In spite of her medical condition, she got married at the age of 26. Luckily, she had a loving, kind and understanding husband and hence they were coping along very well. He was very co-operative and was compromising his needs and desires for the sake of their  marriage. After 8 years of being together, their craving for a child increased. After a lot of counseling,  IUI  was attempted on Rebecca  through general anesthesia, but the attempt was unsuccessful. Her uterus was also small in size and hence chances of threatened abortion were high.

She was adamant that she wanted to have her own baby, but when the situation was explained to her she realized that the only option left was surrogacy. She agreed to surrogacy on the condition that she wanted to use her own egg  along with her husband’s sperm for the procedure. She was aware of the trauma she will have to undergo for egg collection during OR (oocyte retrieval) with her condition of vaginism. Here also 3 unsuccessful attempts were made as the response to stimulation of eggs was poor. Finally, she relented for donor egg IVF with husband’s sperm and they were blessed with twin babies through surrogacy.

This had happened three years back, recently I was invited to the kids third birthday party. I was dumbstruck at the change in Rebecca. She was all involved and always doting on the children. Her husband told me that she would not allow any servants or nurses to take care of the babies and made it a point to singlehandedly look after the children. Initially, I had apprehensions as to how she would respond to the children since surrogacy was done  with donor egg, knowing how particular she had been of using her own eggs. All my suspicions vanished into thin air, seeing how wonderfully she was taking care of the children.


I distinctly remembered how talkative she was when she first came to me and many a time I would have to strongly bring her to a halt so that I could continue. But now she was not even bothered about anything else and was completely immersed in the activities of her children. I recognized the value of the maternal instinct – once children are born, mothers makes no distinction between own egg or donor egg.



Dr. Mani
Surrogacy specialist
GIFT IVF Centre (Director)

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