A Scottish woman gave birth to her miracle baby after 25 long years of multiple failed IVF treatments costing her a staggering amount of £100,000.
Helen Dalglish is a 53-year-old woman from Glasgow’s Dennistou who went through 21 failed rounds of in-vitro fertilization before eventually giving birth to her daughter, Daisy Grace, in September 2022.
“When you get that little miracle at the end, you forget about the 25 years. I was looking down, and the bump was getting bigger, and I thought, ‘Am I dreaming?’” Helen told The Daily Record.
“Even now looking at her I can’t believe I’m a mom,” she said. “It’s surreal.”
Helen first moved to Cyprus in her early 20s and started trying to become pregnant with her then-husband at the age of 28.
However, the couple eventually moved back to Scotland when they were diagnosed with “unexplained fertility,” despite the tests showing no complications or whatsoever.
They began their fertility treatment and underwent the first round of IVF for free under NHS. But when it failed, the couple decided to put all their life savings into fertility treatments.
“Sometimes it got too much emotionally, physically, and financially,” she said. “Sometimes we stopped for a year or two. Because they said it was unexplained, we thought, ‘We’ll do some yoga, meditation, alternative health, because there’s nothing stopping us. Maybe it’ll just happen if we forget about it.”
“Every one that fails, you’re absolutely devastated. It’s like a death,” she added.
According to Dalglish, medics in Cyprus initially told her that there was some issue with the positioning of her uterus, but doctors in Scotland didn’t think it was the problem.
The mum-of-one said it was not easy to go through all those difficult procedures as every time the doctors transferred the embryos to her womb, the pain was excruciating, and it felt like they were ‘hitting a wall.’
Throughout her journey, the Scotland native became pregnant three times, but all her pregnancies ended in miscarriages.
“By that point, I was 41 and 42 and they just weren’t sticking. I would get to around nine or 10 weeks of pregnancy,” she told The Daily Record.
“What kept me going was I just kept seeing this baby. I tried to switch it off sometimes and said ‘stop punishing yourself and putting your body through this.’ Sometimes I would try and accept it, but then I couldn’t.”
Eventually, after all the failed attempts, Helen decided to use donor eggs – however, despite creating ten healthy embryos, the doctors told her there was no success.
When Helen lost all hopes of becoming a mom, she found the Dunya IVF Fertility Centre in Kyrenia with her second partner, and they decided to try it. But in the meantime, he father passed, and she postponed her decision to undergo the treatment.
Then after her mother persuaded her, Helen took the plunge.
On their second attempt, the medics told her she was pregnant.
“The two of us burst out crying and screaming. I think my dad must have had something to do with it,” Dalglish recalled.
“When we came home, I burst out crying. It felt like 25 years of grief trying to escape,” she said about the time when she held her daughter in her arms for the first time. “She seems the most placid, laid-back, happy baby. It’s almost like I waited so long and now I’m being spoilt.”
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Source The Daily Record
