Campaign Story

My name is Samantha. My husband Jake and I have been together since 2013, and married in 2017. We are happy together and live in sunny Bradenton, Florida. We enjoy spending time gardening and keeping our home tidy and decorated. We love antiquing and playing pickleball on the weekends, and enjoying a bonfire on chilly nights. We love going on adventures together and spending Holidays with family. Most of all, we love the thought of one day having children of our own! We want to share our world with a child that we are both genetically apart of.
Jake is an only child and I have 4 siblings. I loved growing up with siblings and am the oldest girl of 5 children with an older brother, and 3 younger sisters. Jake had 3 step siblings whom he wasn’t close with because of an age gap and was raised as an only child with his parents in Bradenton. I am from Vermont. We met in Bradenton in 2013 and instantly connected through music and life and are thriving here in this small beach town on the East Coast of South Florida. We are financially stable and have enough money for our responsibilities and hobbies, as well as emergency funds, and I just started a 401k. However, in August of 2021 we learned that Jake has a low sperm count with low quality sperm and were told the only way to conceive would be through IVF. I am 31 and Jake is 36. By now we would have expected to have started a family with 1 child. We both want 1 child. If God wills us more children we would accept his blessing, though 1 child would be the world to US. It started in 2019 when I knew I was approaching 30 and we hadn’t naturally conceived yet. I had been ovulation testing, temping, and tracking my cycles for the optimal times to baby dance for conception. Every time the two week wait would drag on and finally a big fat negative pregnancy test result would be the end of my hope for that cycle, and then my cycle would begin. Sometimes my cycle would begin early at 28 days, then 32 days (right on time for me), then sometimes it never came. 45 days came and went, big fat negative, still no period, then 50 days, 75 days. Still negative pregnancy tests and then out of nowhere I would get a cycle. My wonky cycle, and the fact that we had no success over and over and over prompted me to test my hormones and have am ultrasound. My hormones in conjunction with my ultrasound showed PCOS and that is when Jake and I were referred to a Fertility Specialist for a sperm analysis. That news was hard but we still had hope that if Jake had normal sperm that we could keep timing intercourse around a cycle where I ovulated and we would be blessed with a pregnancy! Simple right? The sperm analysis came back and we were very bluntly told, the only way we would be able to conceive is through IVF. I cried. Jake was heartbroken that he was also part of why we had been unsuccessful in conceiving, and we have been living in hopes that something would change and it would happen! We are now coming to the realization that years are passing us by and we must make our dream of being parents come true by doing the work that must be done. Like all things worth having, they are worth working hard for. Even something that should biologically happen naturally. We have been working hard towards saving extra for this. We don’t want to go into deep debt to make our dream come true, so we are asking for your help! We are going to start at the urologist. Jake was referred to the urologist for a full work up to see why his sperm count is low. From there we will know our next step. We are still only beginning the process and our lucky to have a large community surrounding us of those IVF parents who have gone before us for support and encouragement. It won’t be easy. It will be worth it!