A young woman who tragically lost her baby on Mother's Day was denied fertility treatment until a hero donor came along.
Elise Casey, 23, and her 24-year-old partner Callum Fishwick have struggled with fertility issues for three and a half years.
Callum has been told he has a low sperm count, whilst 23-year-old Elsie has low Anti-Mullerian Hormone (AMH) levels - meaning she could go into early menopause.
They had originally decided to go through IVF for the birth of their first child, Mollie, who sadly died before birth.
IVF, or in vitro fertilisation, is the process where an egg is removed from a woman's ovaries and fertilised with sperm in a lab.
The couple from Accrington first went to the doctors in September 2021, reports Lancs Live, where they found out about what was preventing them from conceiving naturally. Having done her research into treatment options, Elsie felt "confident" about IVF as the next step of her journey to motherhood.
However, the Aldi worker's ovaries weren't responding to the medication, meaning she only ended up with one, good quality embryo. In the end, the embryo was implanted during the first round and first transfer of the IVF process, ending up being the couple's baby girl, Mollie.
With one embryo able to be implanted, Elsie had a transfer on December 3, 2022. She was told "everything was going well" at 12 weeks, and she was classed as a low-risk pregnancy.
On Friday, March 17, 2023, she had just finished a shift at Aldi and felt very tired when her waters suddenly broke, reports Lancs Live.
"I rang the early pregnancy unit straight away and they got me in there to test to see if it was my waters that had gone, which they confirmed it was," she recalled. "But, they had no one to scan me that evening, so I had to stay in hospital by myself, my partner couldn't stay with me."
Everything appeared to be stable at first - until scan four hours later confirmed that her baby daughter had passed away.
Elsie went into labour with Mollie the next day, which was Mother's Day. Now, months later, she is still waiting for the post-mortem results to see if she had an incompetent cervix or a possible infection that wasn't discovered.
Further heart-breaking news came when she was told her AMH levels had halved in the last 12 months, meaning she could go into menopause as soon as next year.
The couple have tried to go for another round of IVF as they race against time, but were told they are unable do it on the NHS again as they had tried once before.
A close friend set up a Go Fund Me page in response so they could raise enough money to undergo the treatment privately, needing around £8,000-£10,000 to do so.
But in a stroke of luck Elsie and Callum have now received an offer from a private donor - meaning they could now have their second round of IVF sooner than they could have hoped.
