A British couple are celebrating the birth of a baby girl after ten years of trying to conceive using IVF, at an estimated cost of about £64,000. Their daughter, Olivia, was conceived on the couple's 15th attempt at IVF and was born last month.
Delina and Simon Tree, who are both 40 years old and from Sevenoaks in Kent, were told that they only had approximately a five per cent chance of success with IVF, due to the number of treatments they had previously had. Despite this, they kept on trying, and theirs is now thought to be one of the longest 'IVF marathons' to have ever taken place in the UK. According to fertility experts, most couple will either conceive on the fifth or sixth attempt or will give up trying, and seek alternatives, at about the same point.
The couple originally turned to IVF after Mrs Tree had had to have a Fallopian tube removed after a natural pregnancy was ectopic. She has since been examined by dozens of consultants across the country and none of them have been able to explain why her eggs, fertilised outside the body with her husband's sperm, had failed to develop once they had been re-implanted. Mrs Tree was encouraged by their family doctor to undergo a 15th IVF cycle last year. 'For the first four months I was terrified', she said. 'When friends congratulated me it didn't sink in. I would even go for extra private scans to make sure that the baby was OK', she added.
During the couple's extended period of treatment, which required them to remortgage their house - twice - and work lots of extra hours as overtime in order to be able to pay for it, they previously conceived, but suffered an early miscarriage, and also looked into adoption as an alternative. Delina Tree said all their efforts had been totally worthwhile: ' All that time, effort and money was definitely worth it in the end', she said, adding: 'We are so happy'.
The couple hope that 'going public' with their experiences will give encouragement to other couples undergoing IVF, particularly those who may be feeling disillusioned after a failed attempt. Each time they were unsuccessful - at a cost of about £4,000 - they felt that they were 'pouring money down the drain', said Mrs Tree. She explained that the couple had taken out bank loans, remortgaged, asked their parents for money and that she had stayed in a job she hated and that her husband, a carpenter, had 'worked evenings and weekends just so we had enough money for the IVF'.
