Patient Stories

After three failed IVF cycles with her own eggs in Manchester, S. was told at 43 that her chances of success had fallen into single figures, and that the NHS donor egg waiting list could stretch beyond two years. She and D. spent months researching clinics abroad before choosing Cyprus, partly for the legally anonymous donor programme and partly because our clinic operates inside Kamiloglu Hospital rather than as a standalone centre, which mattered to S. after a difficult reaction to sedation in a previous cycle. Their coordinator matched them with a screened donor in her early twenties who shared S.'s hair colour, eye colour and blood type, and the whole match was confirmed before they booked flights. They flew into Ercan and spent eight days in Kyrenia, with D. describing the trip as "half medical, half honeymoon we never had". The transfer of a single blastocyst took ten minutes, and they were back at their harbour-side hotel by lunchtime. Twelve days later, back in the UK, their blood test came back positive, and their daughter was born the following spring. S. says the hardest part of the whole journey was grieving the genetic link, something our counsellor discussed with her openly before treatment, and she wants other women over 40 to hear that part of the story too.

"Three failed cycles taught us what bad communication feels like. This time someone answered every message, even on a Sunday night during the two-week wait."

J. and M. from Leeds had been trying for four years when J. was diagnosed with obstructive azoospermia: healthy sperm production, but none reaching the ejaculate. Their UK clinic quoted over £9,000 for surgical sperm retrieval plus ICSI, with a months-long wait for the procedure. What brought them to Cyprus was a detail most clinics could not offer: J.'s TESA procedure would be performed in a proper hospital operating theatre at Kamiloglu Hospital, with a resident anaesthesia team, on the same morning as M.'s egg retrieval one floor away. J. admits he was more nervous than M., but the procedure took under twenty minutes and the embryologist confirmed viable sperm had been found before he had finished his recovery coffee. Eleven eggs were collected, eight fertilised in the lab, and two reached good-quality blastocyst stage by day five. A single embryo was transferred and the second was frozen, a decision the doctor talked them through carefully rather than pushing for a double transfer. Their son arrived the following summer, and the frozen embryo is still in storage for a sibling attempt.

"I expected a clinic in an office block. What we got was a real hospital, a surgeon, an anaesthetist, and an embryologist who came out to tell us the news in person."

A. and T. from Stuttgart carry a sex-linked genetic condition in T.'s family, the kind passed down through the X chromosome that affects boys far more severely than girls. After losing a much-wanted pregnancy and facing the risk of passing the condition on, they wanted certainty before another transfer. PGD to avoid a sex-linked inherited disease is tightly restricted in Germany, so they looked abroad and found that in Cyprus it is available under current regulations for exactly this medical reason, with eligibility confirmed during consultation. What persuaded them to choose our clinic over the others they shortlisted was the first video call: the doctor spent forty minutes explaining the PGD process, realistic pregnancy expectations for A.'s age, and the small possibility that no unaffected embryo would be suitable for transfer, a scenario other clinics had simply never mentioned. A.'s cycle produced nine eggs, and PGD screening identified three chromosomally normal embryos unaffected by the condition. One healthy embryo was transferred, and their child was born the following year, free of the inherited disease that had worried them for so long. A. and T. say the honesty about what could go wrong was, in the end, what made them trust what went right.

"Other clinics just told us what we wanted to hear. This clinic explained the science, the odds and the limits. That difference is exactly why we came."