Kreena Dhiman shares her story

March 2023

Hello 
 

Well, February for me has come and gone in a flash, and it’s so nice to see the lighter evenings and mornings creeping in giving us a taste of what is to come. 

It's International Women’s Day. So can I take this chance to thank all the brilliant women who give their time to help us understand and navigate our fertility better.

February saw some brilliant women joining us on Let's All Talk Fertility

Fertility Acupuncturist, Sarah Clark was first up.

I love acupuncture and have long been a fan of both fertility support and indeed anything to support my physical and mental health.  Sarah shared with us how acupuncture can help in the lead up and during treatment for both men and women, and how important it is to find a fertility specialist who will understand and work alongside your clinical fertility treatment. Check out her session here.

It is always a pleasure to chat to Chair of BICA, Angela Pericleous-Smith,  ( https://www.bica.net/ ) 

We talked about the importance of communication throughout your treatment, not only with your partner but also with your friends and family, letting people know how you are feeling and what you need or indeed don’t need is important. 

It’s good to remember that often men and women feel and react very differently to the fertility roller-coaster, and it’s good to talk and make sure you make use of your clinics counselling offer.

Finally in February we were joined by the incredible Dr Venkat from Harley Street Fertility Clinic.

Dr Venkat was a font of knowledge and answered so many of your questions we learnt so much from this session and recommend tuning in to the replay if you have a pass as it really was an insightful 45 mins.  

If you are already a Full Access Pass holder you can watch this talk, the full on-demand library and every other LIVE session throughout the year including our popular "Ask Anything" Q&A sessions. Or if not, click on the button below and sign up!

Coming up in our final month of talks as we head towards The Fertility Show (more on that later)

We will be covering Egg Freezing: all you need to know if you are considering this option, as we will be joined by Dr Hall from the Harley Street Fertility Clinic. 

We will be chatting to Bethan Shoemark-Spear;  Bethan is the Wales Project Worker for Fertility Network UK who will be sharing more about the journey to parenthood for her and her wife, and what you might need to consider as a lesbian couple on a route to parenthood. 

The brilliant Anya Sizer, who heads up Fertility Network UK Fertility in the Workplace support group & campaign will be joining us to talk about how you can navigate fertility in the workplace both from an employee or employer point of view.
 
Finally we will be joined by Dr. Katharina Spies, Medical Director at Vida Fertility, Spain who is our guest for our last in the season of “Ask Anything” Q&A. Don’t miss this opportunity to ask any questions you have about your fertility journey!

March sees two big announcements

 Firstly, tickets for The Fertility Show are now on sale ... book before the end of March to claim 20 % off by using this link.

We are busy securing the best speakers and experts to join us for our renowned seminar programme. 

And we are also delighted to announce that we will be working with some incredible fertility ambassadors to help us help you. These amazing people have all been in your shoes and walked the path that you are walking, and by sharing their stories they offer support, inspiration and insight to help guide you on your journey.

We are delighted that Amber Izzo@amber.izzo , Not a Fictional Mum, @notafictionalmum, Kreena Dhiman, @akreenadhiman, Carla Cressy, @carlacressy and Tina Brown, @life_with_the_brown_family are already on board as our fertility show ambassadors and we hope to announce more in the coming weeks. You can see an interview with Kreena below who is sharing a little insight to her incredible story.

March is Endometriosis Awareness Month

Both Sophie Sulehria and I have suffered from this debilitating and painful disease that has significantly impacted both of our fertility journeys.  And you’ll remember form last month the interview we had with Carla who has launched The Endometriosis Foundation.

 In order to mark the month we will be hosting with Carla, Let’s all Talk Endometriosis free talks taking place every Thursday of the month of March at 7.30.  Book your FREE place here. 

Kreena Dhiman: "Find your tribe, find people that get you"

1: Can you tell us a briefly about your story

My journey with infertility began when I was diagnosed with breast cancer aged 33.  My husband and I had been married for two years, we were looking to begin building our family, but then cancer tore through our world. One conversation that will never leave me came about when I asked my oncologist about the effects of chemotherapy on my fertility and ability to become a Mum. 'Kreena' he replied, 'My job here is to save your life, not to create new life.' It felt like the harshest reality check I had received about my disease and the impact it would have on my future, if I were to survive to have one. I pushed and we agreed that I'd be granted one round of urgent fertility preservation (egg collection).  Within 14 days I was in theatre having my eggs collected, we then fertilized them using my husband's sperm and put 12 Day 1 embryos on ice.

Over the next few years, I continuously checked in with my oncology team about carrying a pregnancy using our frozen embryos, the response was always the same, it was too risky to come off my oncology treatment in order to try to conceive.  Then tragically, three years after starting chemotherapy, I went into acute heart failure and almost lost my life.  My heart had slowly been damaged by the drugs that were used to save me from breast cancer. During a consultation with my cardiologist, it was made clear to me that carrying a pregnancy would never be an option.

I invested huge amounts of time researching surrogacy both in the UK and overseas.  We quickly knew that we wanted to stay in the UK and that we wanted to undertake an independent journey.  In 2018 after matching with a surrogate in 2017 we welcomed my baby girl Amaala into the world, the journey to her quite frankly saved my life. 
My husband and I are both from big families and we knew we wanted more than one child.  We embarked on a second journey, with a second surrogate and the use of an egg donor. Donors from minority communities are so hard to find in the UK and with the added complexity of wanting to pursue known egg donation, we found ourselves looking abroad for options.  Our donor came from South Africa, and we met her in Cyprus for her egg collection and our embryo creation.  A few months later I returned to Cyprus with our new surrogate, and we underwent our embryo transfer just weeks before the covid pandemic hit. When we returned to the UK we found out our transfer had worked and that we were pregnant and six weeks into our pregnancy we found out we were having triplets! In August 2020, ten weeks prematurely and amidst the chaos of covid, our three miracle boys entered the world.  Today they are two years old, our family is complete, and we are literally living a life we once dreamt of. Breast cancer brought us some of our darkest days, but it also brought us our four miracle children, and for that, I wouldn't change a thing. 
 
2: You are incredible and have such resilience, how do you keep yourself strong and positive when faced with such adversity .

I have a few life mantras that I hold close. We grow through what we go through. We never know how strong we are until we are tested, and that pain is never permanent. Acceptance also plays a huge role, once we manage to accept the tragedy or trauma that hits us, once we have managed to process it, it becomes easier to move beyond it. I always keep an eye on the end goal, when I went through cancer, I wanted to be well and in remission, however, to get there, I knew I had to go through chemo, radio, surgery and all the pain they bring. 

When it came to Motherhood, I knew I would have to move mountains to get there and ahead of our first journey I always asked myself, what do you want Kreena; '9 months of a pregnancy or a lifetime of being a Motherhood'.  Once I phrased it like that, I knew that it didn't matter how I got there, as long as I got there. Then on our second journey, when I had to deal with the loss of genetics, the question was similar.  'What do you want, Kreena? Another child, or a DNA link that plays no role in how you parent Amaala' the answer was another child, from there the search for a donor began and we were gifted three tiny lives! What an honour!
 
3: What’s the one thing you would tell your younger self?

I'd tell myself not to listen to the Indian elders who tried to measure my success through a series of tick boxes. Conforming to all that my culture expected of me left me conditioned in my expectations of life and detached from my true self. South Asian girls are constantly told that we have to achieve x,y and z to be a good wife or to run a successful home. We as children to immigrants have been taught to survive and sometimes as a result we forget how to thrive. We spend so much of our time comparing ourselves to one another, trying to outperform one another that we forget the power in vulnerability and the beauty that unfolds when we hold each other up.  I'm grateful for my adversities because they taught me to decondition myself, to shed all the superficial things and to live from the heart. It doesn't matter if we need to ask for help, it doesn't make us weak, it makes us human.  So I'd remind my younger self that all she needs lives within her, and that she doesn't need to prove her worth to anyone. 
 
4: Tell us more about your new business and how you are now helping others

I have a few! I've taken the bold step to move away from my very conventional life as an accountant and to step into a world where I can really make a difference! I'm currently writing my first book which shares my personal story but also talks a lot about what it is to be an Indian girl growing up in a western world.  Through that work - I hope to help people move from culturally conditioned, to courageous and confident to face whatever challenges life brings. I'm working on setting up support services for South Asian women navigating cancer, and lastly but most importantly in this context, I am jumping in with both feet to The Intended Parent.  My business partner Fran and I set up a podcast a few years ago to share our surrogacy stories from the perspective of the girl next door.  We created episodes to guide a regular person through the hugely complex world of UK surrogacy because we knew it was needed, particularly for anyone who chose independent surrogacy.  From there, demand for our services grew and so we set up the UK's only Independent Not For Profit surrogacy organisation. We have courses and resources available on a pay as you go basis where users can literally pick and choose what they want to learn more about, we hope to launch a membership soon too and give everyone in our community all that they need to decide on the type of surrogacy journey that will work best for them.  We have another series of the podcast coming out very soon and we hope that we can help build more families through the gift of surrogacy.

5: Finally, you’ve been invited to be a FS ambassador we are delighted to have you with us, why do you think the show is so important for the TTC community?

I think that in any aspect of life, finding your tribe, finding people that get you, and people who can help you is key to success.  For me everything revolves around connection, connecting with the right people for the right reasons.  The TTC community has been instrumental in my journey to Motherhood and by being a Fertility Show ambassador my aim is to bring hope, knowledge, and experience to the door of anyone who is struggling on their journey to parenthood. 

 
Until next month ... take care. 
 
 

 
Laura x