Infertility struggle

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In her ongoing series on infertility, Kate Carnegie features a Hamilton family who turned to a fertility doctor to get pregnant. The outcome was three times what they had expected.

Meet Sebastian, Kaya and Alexa. They were born on September 15, 2010. The triplets were just 3 and a half when we first met them. Now 5, they are in senior kindergarten. But it wasn’t an easy road getting here.

“We tried naturally and it just wasn’t working.” The triplets mom was 33 at the time. Anya Staszko Fournel, a professional ballroom dance teacher, and her husband Jack were desperate to grow their family. After one miscarriage and years of monitoring at a fertility clinic the news wasn’t good. “It turned out that my uterus was heart shaped rather than triangular so they fixed that and while the doctor was in there he found a lot of endometriosis.”

Anya new it was time to turn to fertility drugs. “I ended up doing injections to stimulate the ovaries.” That meant giving herself a needle full of hormones every day. “The first time I actually did it it took me a good 20 minutes to actually physically go through with it and do it.” The plan was to do IUI – intrauterine insemination that involves placing sperm inside a woman’s uterus to facilitate fertilization. But plans changed and the couple couldn’t make their appointment. Their doctor said to try naturally and see what happens. To their surprise, it worked. “She said ‘well, there is one…well there is two and there is three’. So instantly I started balling…but then I got into mommy mode and asked ‘is everything ok?.”

Drugs that help women become pregnant have replaced in vitro fertilization as the main culprit behind high-risk multiple births.

“Fertility drugs are a problem because we can not control how many follicles are being released.” Dr. Samuel Soliman is with Newlife Fertility Centre. “That is probably the biggest risk nowadays of multiples.”

Anya was pregnant with three and the risks were big. “It’s about 100 times the risk of a singleton.”

At almost 32 weeks the triplets were born. Wisked away from their mother instantly by a medical team. “They are so fragile. They are hooked up to all these machines and they had the feeding tubes in and all the monitoring.”

But, two month later the three tiny babies were home. While mom and dad reflected on their fertility journey. “Talk about it with your friends and family. Don’t keep it all to yourself because you will be surprised how many people around you are going through it.”

Today, Sebastian, Kaya and Alexa are happy healthy normal 5 year old kids.

The risks are so high with multiples that doctors often suggest selective reduction. That’s when one or more of the fetuses are removed from the uterus. Anya’s doctor suggested this for them. She said no and is very lucky to have three healthy children.

Tomorrow Kate will have the story of a family who turned to adoption after infertility rocked their world.