Lisa Faulkner shares her experience with IVF and talks about her decision to adopt
Actress and presenter Lisa Faulkner has opened up about her experience with IVF and how she came to the decision to adopt her daughter Billie in 2008.
The star joined Magic Radio's Emma B for very special programme as part of the station's week long The F Word series. The two hour broadcast rounded up the seven day campaign around fertility with real people, famous faces and experts.
On Saturday (29 August), Lisa joined the show to talk about her experience, with expert input from Professor Joyce Harper, Head of Reproductive Science and Society Group at UCL.
Lisa opened up about different stages in her path to becoming a mother, sharing highs and lows of her journey, which began with an ectopic pregnancy— where the embryo and early foetus implants in the fallopian tube instead of the womb.
She told Emma: “I always thought it was just going to be really easy. Got pregnant, so so excited and then a couple of weeks later I was rushed into hospital with an ectopic pregnancy. It wasn't until the ectopic and I'd lost a tube that I thought, there's going to be trouble ahead."
Sharing her emotions at the time, she spoke about feeling the pressure to conceive: "You know, you need to get better because you need to try and get pregnant again. And so as well as the grief of losing my baby — because it was my baby for those ten days — I was then in a rat race, in the hamster wheel and I’ve got to get pregnant really quickly, even though I’ve got to grieve the loss of this little love.”
Moving through the stages of her own experience, Lisa explained how she went on to be prescribed fertility drug Clomid before reaching the stage where she decided IVF was the next step.
But sadly after the three rounds of IVF were unsuccessful, her doctor suggested she stop.
Lisa and her then husband looked into all of the options, American adoption and American Surrogacy before setting out to adopt.
But she didn't shy away from discussing the challenges of adoption, telling the team: "It's a challenge, it’s not like you’re going to be handed a child and you go, this is a clean sheet, off you go, goodbye. There is trauma and it is a lot to think about and it is an amazing journey to go on."
After such a long journey filled with loss and disappointment they finally adopted daughter Billie in 2008. Billie is now 14 and Lisa's voice fills with pride when speaking about her.
Saying: "I say to her every day that I didn't grow her but we have an invisible line in between my heart and hers and it's like a string that can never be broken and that's there forever."
LISTEN BACK To the full episode.
The F Word is a week-long campaign funded by the Audio Content Fund on Magic Radio raising awareness about (in)fertility.
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