I’m 50 and age is not on my side, so my eggs were no good and the suggested treatment was egg donation.

We first had an egg donation treatment two years ago in Spain, in Barcelona, at the Eugin clinic. It was completely unsuccessful, and the embryo transfer was extremely painful. There was never any mention of sedation. And it should have been. Because of the scarring, there was no way to get the catheter through. They knew all my medical history about my cone biopsy, but didn’t take it into account. I had an ectopic pregnancy a few years back, and a couple years ago, I had an abscess in my fallopian tubes. When I was having these problems with the ectopic pregnancy, I also had a cone biopsy. That left scarring, and so from then on it would be difficult to transfer any embryos.

When I saw this website and that Dr Paraschos was trained under Professor Winston in England, I thought I’d be in safe hands.

And so I went through a similar process, I said about the cone biopsy and about the extremely painful transfer that I had at the Spanish ivf clinic, and straight away, the IVF coordinator, put my mind at rest. She told me that Dr Paraschos was very experienced, that he had lots and lots of experience in embryo transfers – straightforward and more complicated ones – and he would know what sort of treatment to do.

Indeed, Dr Paraschos highlighted that there would be scarring from the cone biopsy. That’s what would have made it difficult to have a straightforward transfer. So, if you’re asking me, it was doubtful that they ever managed to transfer the 2 embryos in Barcelona. As Dr Paraschos highlighted, he couldn’t get the embryos through the scarring tissue without doing something about it.

So this morning Dr Paraschos knew that we should probably need sedation. He tried without sedation at first, but he was ready for the sedation when it proved necessary. He had to dilate the cervix os (the opening of the cervix) between 3.5-4.5 millimitres, and it was quite straightforward after that.

My endometrium was slightly less than what it should be. Ideally, it should have been between 8 and 12 millimitres, and mine was 7 milimiters. But he said that he had successful pregnancies on women who had only 5-6 millimitres before now.

So that was that, four embryos were transferred, and the IVF coordinator has just given us the final lot of medication to take away.

We stayed 5 nights in Athens.

We already have four sons from previous marriages, but we’d like to have a go and have one ourselves.

Everyone is great here at EmBIO. Dr Paraschos if very professional, very forward. The IVF coordinator, has been answering my emails straight away. I emailed, and I thought, it’s going to take a couple of days for an answer, and, before I thought about it, she answered to all my questions, day and night. Really put you at ease.