Jacob and Luke's Surrogacy Journey

A few years ago, Jacob’s sister *Jessica* mentioned that if we wanted to start a family, she would be our surrogate. I kind of smiled said thank you, but in the back of my mind was thinking “well that only happens to rich celebrities” and never really thought about it again. Then one day she mentioned it again and I thought “oh she’s actually serious”

So that evening I went home and spent hours and hours doing research on how surrogacy works and the process of IVF. In our minds we could not fully commit to agreeing to try to start a family until we fully understood the process of how it would work. After months and months of research we decided we were going to make a start! In our research we came across Care Fertility, and so in June 2019 we had a phone call with Care Nottingham to get more detail on the process and to arrange a consultation. The telephone call was so informative. It really got us excited and made us feel that us becoming dads was possible!

Our initial consultation at the clinic went so well but also feels like such a blur. We were so nervous and yet so excited, everything started to feel really real. We decided to go for host surrogacy which involved us having an egg donor so essentially *Jessica* would just be carrying our child if everything was successful. The process was very long but for all the right reasons. Care fertility had to make sure we were all on the same page and everyone felt supported along the way, and we did!

At the time of joining the egg donation list, Care launched their own frozen egg bank which was just incredible and the timing couldn’t have been better. Once we were ready, we were able to look through the online portal of all the egg donors available. It actually didn’t take us to long to choose a donor which surprised us. We opted to go with the large set of frozen eggs to give us the best chance of success. A quick side note, we would just like to say a massive thank you to every woman out there who has ever donated their eggs. You really are changing lives and are so selfless and just truly amazing human beings! Fast forward to egg thaw and fertilisation day and I don’t think either of us have ever felt that nervous. Out of our 9 frozen eggs 7 thawed and 6 fertilised which was an amazing result!

5 days later we were eagerly awaiting a call from the clinic to see how many made it to 5 day Blastocysts, ready to transfer and if we would have any left-over to freeze. WE HAD 3!

We had 1 was transferred to our surrogate and 2 are now on ice! - After the transfer we were sent a time lapse of our little embryo as we decided to include Caremaps with our treatment. We watched that video of our embryo developing everyday for the 2 week wait just hoping and praying that they decided to stick around and get comfortable in our surrogates uterus… THEY DID!!!

I knew I had lied earlier when I said that thaw and fertilisation day was the most nervous we had ever been, because when test day came, it was on a whole new level. But when we saw those 2 lines on that pregnancy test we were in complete shock. We had our scan at 7 weeks at the clinic and everything went amazingly. We said goodbye to Care Nottingham and continued on with our pregnancy.

On the 12th November 2021 our beautiful daughter Nova Feltham arrived into the world and we can’t even put into words how complete we both feel. Our lives changed that day and we have never felt love like this. We feel incredibly lucky and grateful as everything worked first time for us so thank you Care fertility for giving us the greatest gift we could have ever wished for.