Dr Bowman

I had been feeling like we were nearing the end of the road on our IVF journey, but we needed to be sure that we had exhausted every avenue before calling it quits. Or maybe I just needed someone to tell me that enough was enough. We had heard that Sydney IVF was the Rolls Royce of fertility clinics, so we made an appointment with the managing director Dr Mark Bowman, just to get one last opinion.

We made our appointments, booked a lovely hotel overlooking the Opera House and were accompanied by Mum and Aunty Louie. We had a fabulous couple of days.

If you have ever watched an Australian program about infertility it is likely that you have come across Dr Bowman. He is a lovely, compassionate man who tells it like it is.

 We had 3 questions for him:

1. Are there any tests we haven’t had done that we should?
2. Do we qualify for surrogacy?
3. Is it likely we will ever get pregnant?

He had 3 answers for us:

1. Yes, we can do an endometrial biopsy (sounds like fun L) to check for disorders of your uterine lining.
2. No, multiple IVF failure does not qualify us for surrogacy, I would need to have either no uterus or a medical condition that could be fatal if I was to fall pregnant.  The process could take up to 2 years and he would not be prepared to put us up before the ethics board at this stage.
3. He promised to give us an answer within 12 months.

 Dr Bowman was keen to establish as best he could if it was my eggs or my uterus compromising our ability to conceive.  His plan was to grow our embryos to blastocyst stage (approximately 5 days old) and hopefully have something to transfer. If we successfully transfer healthy looking blastocysts several times with no pregnancy then it becomes obvious that our problem is my uterus.

In most cases fertility issues arise from poor egg or sperm quality, It is quite unusual for the problems to lie with the uterus and rare for the problems to be caused by both.

If we have an egg issue then surrogacy will not help us. If we have a uterine issue we may be able to look further into surrogacy. My amazing sister was still sitting on the sidelines waiting to do whatever she could to help us.

I was feeling a mix of emotions as we left Sydney, relieved and overwhelmed, so much so that I had a fully fledged panic attack on the plane back to Launceston.