Campaign Story

Robert and I began dating in 2013. We got engaged January 1, 2020 and decided that I would get off of birth control and see what happened. We did not get pregnant but we were not concerned yet. We got married October 16, 2021 and that is when we really started trying by carefully planning each month out, doing ovulation testing, and lots of tracking. In January 2022 we finally got multiple positive pregnancy tests but at 5 weeks I started bleeding and knew it was not normal so I went to the doctor and my bloodwork did not look good. In July of 2022 after no more success we decided that we would make an appointment and have some labs drawn to ensure everything looked okay. My labs all came back looking great but we were informed that Robert has significantly low sperm counts. Robert tried 3 months of clomid and pregnyl in hopes of improving his sperm quantity and quality but unfortunately it did not work. We decided to just move forward with where things were at, or so we thought. Robert got COVID in September 2023 and ended up with no sperm count. We waited a couple months in hopes that things would improve. We made the decision to try our first cycle of IVF over Christmas and had our retrieval on my 28th birthday. It was an emotional rollercoaster of a day due to difficulties finding viable sperm but they were able to find some. Unfortunately our fresh embryo failed to implant. We decided to move forward right away with a frozen transfer, that also failed in January. After that we chose to take a month off to allow our bodies and hearts time to rest. In March we did a frozen transfer with 2 embryos and got a positive test 4 days later, unfortunately our little one(s) did not continue growing. We took a short break and transferred 2 more in July 2024, unfortunately neither stuck. We transferred our last 2 on September 16th, the day before what should have been our first embabies due date. We finally got multiple positives and had good news at our first ultrasound. Unfortunately, at 8 weeks we found out there was no heartbeat. We are now in another waiting period after Robert had the TESE procedure and I did my second retrieval resulting in only 2 day 5 blastocysts. We planned to transfer both in June but day of transfer we got the call that one didn’t make the thaw so we transferred our only 1 and it didn’t stick. We are looking at starting the process from scratch this fall after saving up and giving our hearts a break!