MIRACLE REAL LIFE
Kim Barrett, 40, from Tollesbury, didn’t think she’d be able to have any more children…
Picking my daughter up from school, she told me about her day. Holding Yasmin’s hand, she explained how she’d learnt all about family trees.
Only, all her classmates had little brothers and big sisters to add to their branches.
‘Can I have a brother or sister?’ Yasmin, then four, asked me.
‘I would like that one day, too,’ I replied. ‘It’s just not as easy for us.’
With polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), I wasn’t sure I would be able to conceive naturally again.
Falling pregnant with Yasmin just before I turned 17, she had been a miracle baby.
And from when she was just a baby, I knew I wanted
For a long time, it was just me and Yasmin
Yasmin to have a sibling. But sadly, that didn’t seem to be the case.
‘Something could happen, but it probably won’t,’ the doctor said when I was 18.
It was devastating to hear – at 18 I should have had years to become a mum.
And when Yasmin’s dad and I decided to separate when Yasmin was eight, it was just the two of us.
And despite having lots of cousins to play with, I always wanted a sibling for her.
But I think she understood as she only asked about having a sibling once.
It was the two of us for a long time – until 2012, when I ended up in a relationship with my close friend James, now 47.
James and Yasmin adored each other and he wanted children of his own, too. But with my PCOS, I wasn’t sure if it would happen.
So in 2014, I went to have an operation at Broomfield Hospital to remove cysts on my ovaries caused by PCOS.
‘You may be able to get pregnant before the cysts grow back,’ the doctor told me. ‘If you don’t get pregnant during this time, IVF will be the only option.’ Over the next
two years, nothing happened.
James was amazing with me and was always there to soothe my worries.
But we didn’t tell Yasmin, then 13, about the struggles we were having. Instead, we were going back and forth to the hospital, desperate for a solution.
When doctors recommended a hysterectomy, we knew we had to act. ‘We could try IVF,’ I suggested.
‘I think we should try it,’ James agreed.
Of course we were nervous, but there was no harm in trying.
As I had Yasmin, we weren’t eligible for IVF on the NHS.
But having inherited some money, we decided to put it towards the treatment.
And telling Yasmin, then 17, she was over the moon for us. ‘This is so exciting,’ she’d squealed, happily.
We were not sure a baby was possible for us
A 17-year age gap didn’t bother Yasmin at all –she never believed she’d have a sibling in the first place.
She was gro
