Here a sperm, there a sperm, but where are we going to get our sperm…
How the hell were two lesbians going to find sperm again? Not just sperm, but a willing donor too. We were still shocked that our now former donor changed his attitude towards us abruptly, hadn’t we already been through enough by now?
We mentioned to Amber’s mum that we were minus a sperm donor at the moment. She said she would make it her personal mission to find a potential donor so that we could start a family. Amber and I both had a laugh, not realising that she was completely serious. Within a couple of weeks she had succeeded and had found us some sperm.
The sperm was frozen and the owner of it was willing to give it to us. He had 3 viles of frozen sperm that he and his wife had decided they would not use. He was unable to donate any more because of a medical condition and they had made the decision that they would not be trying to have their own children. How did Amber’s mum find this? It was a friend of a friend’s son and we just couldn’t believe our luck!
We had also been talking to another lesbian couple who had just had a baby through the fertility centre in Perth called Concept. They recommended going to them as they would be easier to attend with the frozen sperm, and if necessary to go on the donor waiting list (just in case).
We worked out that we would need to see our local GP to get a referral for a specialist and then for that specialist to recommend us to Concept. Not a quick process!
We finally made it to our specialist appointment and Amber and I were sitting in the waiting room watching another lesbian couple play with their toddler. We were desperately hoping that those girls would be us in the near future.
We finally got called in and met our new specialist, Dr W. She is the head specialist at Concept. She read over Amber’s file while we were sitting in her office. Some of the paperwork she was reading we had given to her with the referral from Amber’s GP, and some of that information was from King Edward from when we had lost our baby. It had been sitting in our house for months by now and we had not even thought to look at it.
Anyway we were sitting in this neat little office while the doctor was asking us questions and reading over the file. We talked about what we wanted, Amber’s tricky uterus and what we had been through with the loss of the baby. Then she said something that I didn’t quite comprehend straight away. But the look of horror on Amber’s face confirmed what I thought she had said. The look on both of our faces told the doctor that what she had just said was something that we, in fact, didn’t know.
She had mentioned that the baby had a Y chromosome. For those who don’t know, that means the baby was a boy. We had been told they were not going to perform any genetic testing on the baby and if you have read my previous blogs – you would know we assumed the baby was a girl.
The news totally shocked us and the doctor was apologetic as she didn’t realise we didn’t know all of this information (not that it was her fault we didn’t know). It really felt like yet another blinding blow to our stomachs. We hadn’t been told about the testing, we had named our baby Nevaeh thinking it was a girl, and we had that paperwork in our house for months, not knowing the information it held. Thankfully the name Nevaeh held special meaning being heaven backwards, but the news had floored us.
Dr W said we were all good to go ahead with attending Concept, but Amber would need to do some blood tests and we would both have to have an appointment with a counsellor. Once we did all of this they would let us know the next steps.
We left the hospital feeling horrible. How were we meant to tell everyone that our baby had been a boy? We only told a couple of people as it was almost embarrasing that we had assumed the wrong sex of our baby. Finding this out a year after the loss of the baby made me feel physically sick, so I can only imagine how Amber was feeling.
We said to each other that we needed to move on from that and focus on trying again. We got home and booked in our first appointment at Concept Fertility Centre, which was at that time located at King Edward Memorial Hospital.