After five years of trying to have children, Lorna Fitzpatrick and husband Peter turned to IVF
Lorna Fitzpatrick and her husband Peter discovered they faced infertility due to unexplained circumstances, after trying for nearly five years.
Shortly after learning of this, the couple decided to explore the option of IVF as they were desperate to have a family of their own.
“When you go down the road of wanting to have children, you think it’s just going to happen. Since my mam had babies so easily, I thought I’d be the same,” Lorna told the Irish Independent.
“I had so many friends around me, and they were all at the same stage. Out of my group of friends, I was the first to get married and everyone thought we’d be the first to have children. But then everyone started to have babies before us, so after a couple of years we went to get a few checks done.
“It was unexplained infertility. We went down the IUI route first and we had three goes at it. It was unsuccessful so then we decided to check out IVF.
“We were recommended to go abroad for IVF, but it’s funny how your life goes and twists and turns. It was cheaper to go abroad, and the success rate was higher at the time, but my niece was diagnosed with leukaemia and that threw everything up in the air.
“The whole family was all over the place so I said I can’t go abroad when this is going on and we decided to go for IVF in Ireland.”
Their first round of IVF was positive, and they welcomed their daughter Orla in 2013, with their son Ross joining them after a second round of IVF in 2019.
“We went through one round of IVF; we got three embryos and two implanted. Then we had Orla. I was happy and so thrilled, but also so overwhelmed. We went through so much to get to this stage, and we wanted it so desperately. It was a shock, but it was amazing,” Lorna said.
“We had to go through IVF the second time too. We went for a fresh round, and we only got two embryos, two blastocysts, which is the five-day embryo and the ideal ones for implanting.
“So then we had a girl and a boy. We were very lucky. With our two babies as well, an adopted grandmother of my husband who had no children of her own had left us some money in her will and that paid for the IVF for Orla.
“When we went for the second round of IVF, my husband’s aunt died who also had no children. She left us some money and that paid for Ross’ IVF. There’s a lot of people that don’t have that privilege. We were very lucky because a lot of people go into serious debt for IVF.”
Lorna’s family were all Coombe babies, including her seven siblings, while her mother was born in the same hospital too.
“Ross is five and he tells everyone he was born in the cocoon hospital. He says it makes sense it’s called the cocoon because he was born in a cocoon and the whole family was born there,” Lorna said.
“He comes out with the funniest things, but the Coombe found this out and gave him a t-shirt as a memento.
“I’m one of seven and we were all born in the Coombe, and my mum was born in the Coombe. We’ve a long line of Coombe babies, my two children were born there too.
“I’ve no doubt my children will have their babies there too because we’re all Dublin people, it’s usually where you go. My mother was obsessed with the Coombe. She just loved everything about it.
“She’s 80 now and she still talks about the same consultant she had for six of her babies out of seven, she talks about him to this day. She nearly missed him after he left the Coombe.
“We’ve had three generations born there. My husband was born in the UK, but his sister was born in the Coombe. It’s special for us.”
