Kreena Dhiman

Kreena Dhiman has come through more than most of us could imagine: breast cancer at 33, treatment that saved her life but ended her chance of carrying a child, and a long journey to becoming a mother of four. She speaks openly about the joy of it, and about the quieter grief too, the kind she once described as "hairline fractures in the heart."

"Procreation in the South Asian community is not just a given, it's an expectation."

A diagnosis at 33

She was 33, with the family she'd imagined still somewhere ahead of her, when a breast cancer diagnosis rearranged everything. The tumours were hormonally sensitive, so the treatment had to be relentless: chemotherapy, radiotherapy and a double mastectomy, and a ten-year medical menopause that shut down her ovaries. Her life was being saved and, in the same stroke, the chance to carry her own child was being closed off, before she had ever had the chance to try.

Three years later, on what should have been an ordinary holiday in Canada, she found herself in A&E, unable to breathe. It was acute heart failure, a delayed blow from the very chemotherapy that had saved her life. Her family were told to prepare for the worst. The medicine that had cured her cancer had quietly damaged her heart beyond repair.

Before chemotherapy began, she and her medical team agreed to one urgent round of fertility preservation. It meant weighing two risks against each other: the hormones needed to create embryos could aggravate the cancer growing inside her. She has said she couldn't bring herself to celebrate the embryos created in that window. She could only wonder whether the procedure had cost her time she didn't have. She signed consent forms allowing her husband to use those embryos if she didn't survive, and found what she has called "a perverse comfort" in knowing that whatever happened, a piece of her might still make it into the world.

Why the silence made it harder

Kreena has written about the particular loneliness of going through this as a South Asian woman. She searched forums and social media for someone who looked like her, walking the same road, and couldn't find her. When she began IVF, the South Asian voices she longed to hear weren't there either, and when surrogacy became her only path to parenthood, she has said she knew she'd be "the only brown girl in the room."

"There is so much narrative around being loyal to family, about blood being blood and about shared genes being the definition of family."

Becoming a mother through surrogacy

Once it was certain she would never be able to carry a pregnancy herself, Kreena and her husband set out on an independent UK surrogacy journey, teaching themselves the process, the law and the language of it as they went, because almost none of it had been mapped out for someone like her. After meeting several women who weren't quite the right fit, in late 2016 they met Ina, who became their first surrogate.

In April 2018, nine months after their first embryo transfer, their daughter Amaala was born, grown from an embryo frozen before Kreena's chemotherapy began, a life saved years before it started. Amaala's name means "hope" in Arabic. At home, Kreena calls her their Lakshmi.

A second journey: an egg donor and triplets

When the time came to think about a second child, the path had narrowed again: Kreena's first surrogate couldn't carry a second time, and the embryos frozen before chemotherapy no longer existed. A second child would mean finding an egg donor too. In a culture where, in her words, "blood being blood" and shared genes are so often treated as the definition of family, that search carried its own weight. South Asian egg donor banks in the UK were, she has said, "almost non-existent," so she found a donor in South Africa and travelled to North Cyprus to create embryos using the donor's eggs, a meeting she has described as humbling, and an honour.

By the end of 2019 she had found her second surrogate, Laura. In February 2020, just weeks before the pandemic slammed international borders shut, they flew to Cyprus for the embryo transfer. That August, Kreena's triplet sons, Aanav, Arvaarn and Anaayan, arrived ten weeks early, each a fragile 3lb or so. They spent their first eight weeks in neonatal care, and Kreena and her husband moved to be near them, keeping vigil while their boys grew strong enough to come home.

Building the space she couldn't find

After Amaala's birth, Kreena built the thing she'd needed and never found. With Fran, a fellow mother through surrogacy, she co-founded a podcast, somewhere people going through infertility could turn without shame, and without feeling like the only one. She continues to speak openly about her experience and is an Ambassador for The Fertility Show.

Kreena's story at a glance

Kreena has described her own story as one of tragedy and hope, of grief and gratitude, of surrender and fortitude. She doesn't believe any of it was luck or coincidence. She believes her family was built the way it was for a reason: to change mindsets, and to give other people permission to keep going, even when, as she puts it, the seas feel uncertain.

Kreena Dhiman's story is drawn from her own account, published on The Fertility Show blog. Visit her website.