Campaign Story

Hello, My name is Brooke and my soon to be husband Nathan and I are struggling to grow our family. We so desperately want to be parents and raise a little one of our own. Here is my story: In middle school my parents took me to the doctor as I was not growing?? Weird right! We’ve never been able to find out the cause for why I just stopped growing but that was the start of my journey. I found out that my pituitary gland had little to no growth hormone and I had to get injections nightly to replace the HGH which allowed me to grow to the 5″3 I am today. I then discovered that I also have issues with women hormones and was put on Hormone Replacement Therapy, which allowed for normal development and eventually puberty at age 18. I still to this day cannot have menstrual cycle without taking medication but otherwise all my anatomy is normal. I had always known conceiving would not be a walk in the park. When Nathan and I met back in 2015 I was very up front about my hormone issues and even took him to a few appointments at a fertility specialist for testing to see what we were up against. During this process we learned that I was lacking FSH (Follicle Stimulating Hormone) which is what grows and releases the eggs. I was assured by the physician that all we had to do was replace that hormone as we had done before and we could have children. Nathan and I took that info and ran with it until we were ready to start a family. A couple years down the road now we re-established with the fertility specialist and started the process of doing the VERY expensive injections. The first cycle was discouraging to say the least, my body was not responding, my levels continued to stay low no matter how high they raised the dose of the medication. We were told to stop treatment and wait for an appointment with our physician. Waiting to learn the fate of our family was an emotional rollercoaster, we cried not knowing whether or not we would ever be able to have children of our own. The day came and the news we received was difficult. The physician recommended to possibly try doing a cycle one more time to see if that was a fluke but she was not optimistic and she knows how expensive it is and did not want to put us through potentially fruitless expensive treatment. The next option she presented to us was to try using an egg donor and through IVF hopefully carry a baby to term. This is very expensive $30,000 without insurance and $40,000 with and even then there are not guarantees that it will work. This unfortunately seems like our only option to achieving a child of our own. Personally this was very difficult to hear, I have never entertained the idea of not being able to pass on my genes to my child. I am grieving this loss, but am comforted that I will hopefully still be able to experience pregnancy, the miracle of birth and see Nathan’s genes through our little one. I cannot wait to be a mother and watch Nathan be the amazing father I know he will be. We would be forever grateful if you could donate towards building our family and would like to thank you for your continued support throughout this fertility journey.