DEBORAH and Paul were in high spirits as they drove to the hospital. They had just received a telephone call to tell them one of their frozen embryos had survived the thawing process.
Within a few hours doctors planned to implant it in Deborah in the hope of giving the couple a brother or sister for their son, Jamie, now six, who was born after three cycles of IVF treatment.
Deborah, 40, a National Health Service healthcare assistant from Bridgend, south Wales, said: “We were so happy to think this tiny embryo could have survived being frozen for almost five years. It was something to look forward to.”
When the couple arrived at the IVF clinic at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, they were well aware of what lay ahead of them from previous treatment cycles. Deborah changed into an operating gown and they waited to be called into the theatre, where their embryo would be implanted in her womb.
There were three women on the theatre list to have embryos implanted that afternoon and the couple prepared for their names to be called as they saw the first woman emerge from the theatre.
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Instead, Deborah and Paul were called into an administrative room to be told of a “grave error” that would shatter their hopes of having a second child.
The only surviving embryo had been implanted, by mistake, into another woman. The pregnancy would later be aborted, the thought of which still causes Deborah to burst into tears.
But at the time all the couple were told was that the embryo had been accidentally destroyed.
Deborah said: “They said they were sorry to tell us that there had been an accident in the lab and our embryo had been destroyed. We were in shock. We just couldn’t believe it. I got very upset.”
It was two days before the couple learnt the truth about what had happened to their last frozen embryo.
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They were called back to the hospital to hear that what the couple describe as “the worst nightmare of anyone going through IVF” had happened to them.
By this time their embryo, which had been implanted in another patient, had been aborted.
Paul 38, a planning manager for a printing company, said: “That meeting was possibly even worse than the first one. When we walked into the room there were three people sitting there, including a counsellor. They told us they had put our embryo into another woman.
“At that point we were extremely angry because we had been told this was the one thing that could not possibly happen. We were told there was no way an embryo could be put in the wrong woman due to the strict guidelines in place.”
At the beginning of their treatment the couple had even asked the clinic for reassurance that such a mistake could not happen.
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The couple’s lawyer, Guy Forster of Irwin Mitchell, says that if the other woman’s pregnancy had gone ahead a court would have had to rule on who should be awarded custody of the child.
Deborah and Paul, who decided to speak out to prevent other couples suffering the same trauma, have received a financial settlement as compensation from Cardiff and Vale NHS Trust, which runs the University Hospital of Wales.
Ian Lane, medical director of the trust, said: “We apologise unreservedly for this mistake.
“This was a rare but extremely upsetting incident for everyone involved and we take full responsibility for the distress caused to both couples and their families.”
Lane added that the trust had tightened its checking procedures since the couple were told of the error in December 2007.
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The Welsh embryo mix-up has striking parallels with a series of mistakes at Guy’s and St Thomas’ hospital in London earlier this year, when embryos belonging to three couples had to be destroyed after eggs were fertilised with the wrong sperm.
Professor Brian Toft is the expert appointed by the government to lead an inquiry into the IVF mix-up that resulted in black twins being born to a white couple in 2002. The blunders have prompted him to criticise the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) as “not fit for purpose”.
The HFEA, the government’s IVF watchdog, said it had taken no sanctions against the Welsh IVF clinic, but added that it was taking the accident and witnessing problems very seriously.
It said: “Patients can be confident that clinics are robustly inspected by the HFEA and that we take such incidents very seriously.
“Almost 50,000 cycles of IVF treatment are carried out each year in the UK and less than 0.5% of these are associated with an incident.”
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Readers with further information or comments on IVF mix-ups can write to health@sunday-times.co.uk