“We’re going to be paying off the debt for the rest of our lives.”
An Australian couple who are over £100,000 in debt after seven years’ worth of IVF are finally expecting their second child.
Suvi Mahonen, 47, and her husband Luke Waldrip, 50, began trying for a baby in 2015 after welcoming their daughter Amity two years prior.
Yet after seven years of medical treatments, crushing disappointment and tens of thousands in loans on a fertility journey that spanned three continents, Suvi is only pregnant now.
“Stopping and giving up has been something that has been very much on the cards at times,” she told the Mirror. “The negative test results were devastating; they became soul destroying and it made me feel like a failure.”
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The pair tried treatments in their home country and in the USA in the hopes of conceiving. After several unsuccessful attempts using Suvi’s eggs, the couple eventually headed to a clinic in Russia to try a donor egg.
Taking “one last chance” at the clinic in St Petersburg, the mum said they were “gearing up to be disappointed”.
But shortly after returning home, she got good news: she was pregnant.
“The test was positive and there were tears of joy,” she told the publication. “But a huge part of that was tears of relief.”
Now over £100,000 in debt for the loans they took out over the course of their fertility journey, Suvi says it was all worth it.
“We’re going to be paying off the debt for the rest of our lives, but I said to my husband, ‘I don’t care if we’re living in a tent, we just have our family.'”
