After seven years, 31 rounds of IVF and more than $250,000, little Spencer is a miracle baby
Baby Spencer – seven long years in the making – is the result of an epic IVF odyssey and extreme rendition of the rollercoaster ride tens of thousands of Australians embark on each year.
Strangers stop Suvi Mahonen on the street to coo over baby Spencer and who can blame them?
His birth really was something special.
The new mum and her obstetrician husband, Luke Waldrip, burned through an unheard of 31 rounds of IVF and nearly their last dollar to make the family complete eight weeks ago.
Even now, they can’t quite believe there’s a beautiful blue-eyed boy to show for it because Mission: Impossible wouldn’t do justice to what it took to bring Spencer home to their Gold Coast unit and big sister Amity, 9.
“I look at him and think, ‘wow, you’re here, you’re real’,” an emotional Ms Mahonen said. “We’re just so lucky to have him … honestly, I’ve never been happier.”
She calls him their miracle baby.
Little Spencer was seven long years in the making – testing them in every imaginable way before a fertility clinic in the snowy Russian city of St Petersburg delivered.
Their epic IVF odyssey, detailed in the return of The Weekend Australian Magazine for 2023, is an extreme rendition of the rollercoaster ride tens of thousands of hopeful Australians embark on each year.
If the crushing disappointment of drawing a blank from pricey treatment after treatment wasn’t enough, Ms Mahonen was also racing the clock.
At 48, time was against her.
“It was nuts,” said Dr Waldrip, whose professional advice to most patients is to give up if IVF doesn’t work after a quarter of the rounds they endured.
His wife conceded that their thinking wasn’t always logical.
“Once you get on the rollercoaster, it’s very hard to get off,” she said.
“You live in hope that it will work next time … that you just have to get something out of everything you’ve put in.”
After undergoing 30 rounds of unsuccessful IVF in Melbourne, Gold Coast and Los Angeles with both her own eggs and donated ova, they decided to go all-in on one last try with Russian obstetrician-gynaecologist Olga Zaytseff.
Ms Mahoney was midway through the course when Vladimir Putin unleashed his military on Ukraine, injecting a new element of uncertainty into the calculations. They pressed on and, finally, she became pregnant last April.
But the drama didn’t end there. At week 13, she suffered a traumatic setback at home from a placental rupture.
As she lay on the bathroom tiles, listening to her blood gurgling down the drain, all she could think was “not now”.
At the hospital, a distraught Dr Waldrip retched into a sink while one of his registrars took charge. “I was pretty sure the pregnancy was gone,” he recalled.
Thankfully, the placenta had only partially detached, leaving the umbilical cord intact to preserve the baby’s lifeline.
Then at week 26, Ms Mahoney was diagnosed with gestational diabetes and pre-eclampsia, confining her mostly to the unit as the clock wound down to Spencer’s birth.
True to form, there were complications with his delivery: the baby was in the breech position and Dr Waldrip could do nothing but hold his wife’s hand while a colleague operated. Minutes seemed like hours as the surgery dragged on.
“There he is … oh darling,” Ms Mahoney said when their son emerged – a moment of magic captured by the magazine.
The sense of wonder has persisted through the sleepless nights and wearying routine of caring for a newborn. Dr Waldrip is back at work, Amity is gearing up to go back to school and, yes, the bills are still coming in from Spencer’s arrival, pushing the near-ruinous expense north of $250,000.
When their sweet boy acts up, as babies do, Ms Mahoney reminds herself how precious each day with him is.
“He’s eight weeks old and he’s not going to be that little for long,” she said. “We’re going to blink and he’s going to be Amity’s age, we’ll blink again and he’ll be grown up.
“We’re just enjoying every day. I know all mothers would say this about their baby, but I think he is just awesome.”
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