Love and relationships
Siân Merrylees endured years of heartbreak as she struggled to become pregnant. Then her friend Emily Johnson-Ferguson made a remarkable offer
Siân, 54, works for British Red Cross, and is married to Ian, 58, a TV film editor. They live in west London with Molly and Trilby.
Idon’t recall the moment when I discovered I was pregnant. After five years of struggling to conceive, it was just another marker in a long series of highs and lows. I couldn’t let myself celebrate early. The moment I do remember, however, was just more than a year earlier and the feeling of euphoria when I discovered my friend Emily was serious about donating her eggs to me.
When I met Ian, my now husband, I was 39. We were already trying for a family when we married two years later, not imagining how hard it might be. I visited fertility clinics that friends swore by and was poked, prodded and had more blood tests than I thought possible. For more than a year I visited a Chinese fertility specialist for fortnightly acupuncture and drank a Chinese brew of herbs that looked like rotten twigs and tasted worse. Alongside three rounds of IVF, I was sent for invasive procedures to try to work out why I couldn’t get pregnant. Finally, we had to accept that, realistically, I had less than a 1% chance of succeeding using my own eggs.
It was draining and I was exhausted from the emotional ups and downs. But I felt an almost animal urge to be a mother. There wasn’t a day when I didn’t have some kind of pang. It could be triggered by simply playing with my twin nephews or smiling at a stranger with a bump in a supermarket. I was determined to consider other options.
Following the acceptance that my eggs were not viable, Ian and I did some soul-searching. I was keen to adopt and spent ages scrolling through adoption websites. But Ian was wary of the process. It was a friend who had already decided on the egg donation route who finally persuaded me to give it a try, saying at least it was a chance for Ian to have a child of his own.
Friends and relatives were hugely supportive when they heard and there was some talk of donation, but nothing quite took off. With Emily, it was different. I knew her through my friend Vicki, her sister-in-law. Whenever we met at Vicki’s, we got on like a house on fire, but our paths wouldn’t normally cross. This meant we weren’t risking a close relationship if things got complicated later, but in reality, we’ve just got closer.
Ian was thrilled at her offer. We had first met as guests at a wedding and he said later it was the joy in my face at cuddling a friend’s baby that struck him. By the time Emily suggested donating her eggs, he’d seen the private tears when I felt I would n
