Campaign Story

Hi everyone,

We are married couple Ant (45) and Becky (39) from Staffordshire in the UK. We are very thankful to be able to have the chance at raising some funds to try for our longed for rainbow baby.

We have been trying to conceive naturally since 2018. Sadly, during this time we have had 5 miscarriages. After our first loss we endured nearly a year of complications. I was then found to have a uterine septum which I had surgery to remove. We were hopeful that this was the reason for our first miscarriage. Sadly we went on to have 4 more losses. It has been the most difficult time of our lives full or heartache and grief but at the same time hope that one day we will hold our precious baby in our arms.

Throughout it all we have been incredibly lucky to have one another. Ant has been my rock. We are also so fortunate to have our furbaby Bert, a little Shorkie who we adopted after our 5th loss. I firmly believe he is a little angel sent to help us heal and give us the strength to keep trying.

What we know from all the investigations we have had is I have Hashimoto’s (Autoimmune Thyroid Disease) which is now treated well with thyroxine. I also have a very high level of natural killer cells. We all have NK cells in our bodies. They are immune cells that help our bodies to fight off things like viruses and tumours. However in a pregnancy when levels are too active and/or too high they see a pregnancy as they would a virus or tumour and effectively cause the pregnancy to fail. What we know is with the right treatment to bring my Natural Killer cells to non-cytotoxic levels we can have a baby. We saw a private reproductive immunologist in London for treatment but unfortunately due to secondary infertility (sperm morphology issues) we are no longer able to fall pregnant naturally. We have been told by an IVF consultant our best chance at having our longed for family is IVF with ICSI (the best sperm is selected to fertilise my eggs) with PGT-A (testing of the embryos for genetic issues due to our age) and medication for my NK cells (intralipids, steroids and inhixa).

Unfortunately due to my age we do not quality for funding on the NHS and we have now spent most of our savings and money kindly given to us by family on our fertility journey so far. We do have some towards our treatment but are short by £8,000. This is why we have set up our fundraiser in the hope we can raise the remaining funds to start IVF.

We cannot thank you enough if you read our story. Any money you can give is appreciated more than we can ever put into words.

We would also like to send our thoughts to all of you that find yourself on this difficult journey.

Ant and Becky 🙂