Online Reviews

Margreet: In Holland, once you turn 43 plus one day, IVF is out for you. Nobody cares. Your insurance doesn’t cover ivf for women over 43. Of course, you can do ivf or an egg donation treatment, but all the ivf cost is on you. It’s sad, because you know you have paid all your life for insurance, but when they hear you’re 44 or something, it’s goodbye ivf, let alone egg donation or embryo donation! Your hands are tied. So all you can do is look for a trustworthy ivf clinic, or better yet, an egg donation clinic, preferably abroad.

Christiaan: Egg donation in Spain is more expensive. We chose to have our ivf treatment with oocyte donation in Greece (egg donation costs are lower in Greece). EMBIO ivf clinic is more than you expect.

Margreet: Besides the fertility specialist, Thanos Paraschos, our IVF Coordinator is always there for us. I call her anytime, for whatever I need. She even sent the ivf drugs we needed to Holland, unbelievably quickly. She explained everything beautifully. Everything goes on in a very soothing way.

Christiaan: You’d never expect that high level of service in a fertility clinic in Southern Europe!

Margreet: What we need to say here is that any couple looking for egg cell donation can contact the IVF coordinator for EMBIO in Greece, or Fertility Specialist Dr Thanos Paraschos himself, and find out everything. And we can tell you through the IVF coordinator anything else you need to know about our ivf experience with egg donation in Greece at EMBIO and Dr Paraschos. There are good chances at EMBIO to get pregnant. Look at their ivf success rates. IVF at 44 is possible, you know.

Christiaan: Today, Tuesday, I gave sperm and in 2 days we’ll go through the embryo transfer here at EMBIO. And we’re going back on Sunday. We’d love to stay more in Greece, but in my line of business that’s not possible.

Margreet: If we had the chance to be here, the ultrasound tests would be free at EMBIO.

Christiaan: The last few days Margreet took extra good care of me so I wouldn’t catch a cold, as a friend had told us the quality of sperm is influenced when you have the flu. We didn’t ask Dr Paraschos, but we took all the extra care we could, to make sure everything goes well, and we have our baby!

Hans: My wife is a doctor and knows the German medical system from inside. First of all, the German national health system is totally hostile towards ivf. Before 2009 a fertility patient was entitled to three ivf tries with a minimal participation in the cost of ivf treatments. As of 2009 even those three ivf attempts are not granted by the German nhs, so we have to pay everything out of our pockets, and fertility treatments are too expensive in Germany. This is preposterous. The average German cannot afford any fertility treatment. Even IVF drugs are so much more expensive here than in Greece.

The second barrier is German legislation banning egg donation. I’m not judging that. I’m just saying there is absolutely no way you can have donor egg ivf in Germany. And that’s that. Your hope of parenthood is cut off. Notice, I’m saying “parenthood” and not conception. In Germany you can’t even adopt a child if you are over 40 or something. That restriction goes for either one of would-be parents.

Then we come to the level of quality of German doctors, which is unacceptable, to say the least. And I know what I’m talking about. As I said, my wife is herself a doctor, and I’m a university graduate. The German national health system forces doctors to spend more time in paperwork than treating their patients. So when it comes to fertility treatments, they prove worthless. Back in 2006 when we started, the law gave us 3 ivf treatments. We lost all three of them due to their incompetence. To be more specific, we lost all three attempts with my wife’s own eggs because the doctors were not available for oocyte retrieval during her ovulation. They failed to schedule the tests and the whole procedure properly. We don’t live in Heidelberg. We’re kilometers away. But we had to travel to Heidelberg just to be seen by the gynecologist for 10 minutes. He said the next appointment should be in 4 days. We said “ovulation is in 2 days.” But the doctor wanted to go home for the weekend.

Christa: “Look at my hormones! Ovulation is on its way!” I said to him.

“Sorry, we’re closed for the weekend.”

That’s a crime! Come Monday morning, we call him and he says, “We lost it.”

I was desperate. It was so unfair. With mistakes like that you not only lose your 3 ivf chances, you lose your chance to have a baby with your own eggs as time goes by.

Then they made me miss my two other fertility treatments experimenting foolishly with iui on me. They didn’t really examine my case. They didn’t run the right blood and hormonal tests. All they did was keep trying with intra uterine insemination until they realized it was a dead end. Then we had to go all over the excruciating red tape with the insurance system, which took time for the expenditure to be approved. Problem is, time works against our fertility. The number of your eggs decreases dramatically with age.

No one took my problem seriously in Germany. That’s heartbreaking, you know. Especially when you’ve been trying to have a baby for years. The toll is great for the whole family.

We knew fertility specialist Thanos Paraschos in Greece, so when we realized something was going seriously wrong with the doctors in Germany, we started consulting him at each and every step from some point onwards. We couldn’t trust them anymore. So we would send test results and he would say “How did they ever come with such values?” (headslap) Nothing made sense. All they did was miss my ovulations. And I was definitely not getting any younger.

Hans: All three times they failed to get even a single egg of my wife’s, while Dr Paraschos managed to get her own eggs the first time we tried with him!

Christa: The German doctor will never say “Your case is different, so we will follow a different protocol.” One protocol for all, no matter what.

Another thing is that German legislation forbids embryo transfers of more than two embryos at a time. Their explanation is that triplets are a risk for abortions or during labor.

Hans: Her gynecologist in Germany is a very good man, but has no ivf experience. So he said she should go abroad to get pregnant. Dr. Thanos Paraschos has proved an excellent choice. Now we’re trying for our second baby with him, this time with donor eggs.

Amazing Success with Donor Eggs!

It was an amazing success. We had been through so many ivf tries. Now, first time with egg donation, and I was pregnant! It was something that made us delirious with happiness. It was incredible!

Read more Donor Egg IVF Stories!