Like many young girls, Prue Craven was marking each step through puberty, waiting for the moment she would finally get her period like all of her girlfriends – but the day never came.
Prue would soon discover that she was born with an extremely rare condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser Syndrome (or MRKH), which essentially means she was born without a uterus.
MRKH is a unique condition that impacts the reproductive system of one in 4,500 women at birth.
Born without a uterus: Prue Craven’s story
In this episode of Darling, Shine!, Prue opens up to Ellidy and Chloe about her condition and what it was like to become one of few people around the globe to receive a uterus transplant.
While Prue’s condition was a shock, the gravity of the situation would not truly hit home until she felt ready to begin her journey into motherhood.
After seven IVF and three failed surrogacy attempts, Prue finally became eligible for a uterus transplant.
“Between 2013 and 2014, I did six IVF cycles. Some of them weren’t successful and some of them were and without telling all of our friends and most of our family, we actually shipped all of those embryos over to Thailand to do commercial surrogacy over there because we didn’t have a surrogate as an option in Australia and commercial surrogacy was the only way to go,” Prue said.
Now three months post-operation, Prue explains exactly how it felt waking up from surgery with a uterus.
“Do I have a uterus? Is it there? And they said, yes. You’ve got a uterus, and I felt this wave of emotion. I put my hands on my belly, and I could feel that it was swollen. I was like, right, belly swollen? There’s a uterus there, clearly,” Prue said.
In this heart-warming chat with Chloe and Ellidy, Prue unpacks her long fertility journey, how the condition impacted her growing up and how she became eligible for a uterus transplant.
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