I'm glad I didn't use my late HUSBAND'S SPERM

When her partner died, Amy Molloy considered the possibility of having his baby

- AMY MOLLOY

At my wedding to my first husband in 2007, a rumour circulated I was pregnant. When a friend told me, I laughed out loud – the only other option was to cry. I wasn’t pregnant. I was a 23-year-old marrying a man who, according to doctors, had less than a month to live.

The idea was ridiculous and heartbreaking for multiple reasons. Our days were spent in an Oncology ward and, instead of foreplay, I kissed him goodnight each evening, praying he would still be breathing the next morning.

Eoghan, then my fiancé, was diagnosed with malignant melanoma at 34 (I was 22), and we chose to freeze his sperm, knowing chemotherapy was likely to affect his fertility. Naively, we assumed we’d take the next step together. We were living in Dublin because he was Irish and wanted to start treatment close to his family.

My father had been paralysed from the waist down by Hodgkin lymphoma, a tumour wrapped around his spinal cord, when I was 17. I was the perfect partner for a cancer patient in many ways – unperturbed by medical jargon and educated in the side effects of treatment. I was also hopeful: my dad had made a miraculous recovery after a stem-cell transplant, so even stage 4 cancer didn’t seem like a death sentence.

On the rainy morning in November 2006, when I went with my husband to deposit his sperm, we made light of the experience. It was just one of the many surreal experiences we forced ourselves to face with black humour, alongside shaving his head, eating ice cream during chemo and the time another patient asked him: ‘Have you considered euthanasia?’ Fourteen months later, after I watched my husband fall into a coma and pass away, nothing seemed funny any more.

The laws behind donation