Campaign Story

My name is Felicia. My partner John and I were college sweethearts, married just after graduation, and even before the wedding we knew that we wanted a big family. So, we started trying right after we got married. About nine months after we first started, we got our first positive pregnancy test; we were overjoyed. That is, until we reached the eight week mark and discovered that we had been expecting twins but had lost one of them. Not even a week later, we lost the other one.

It was devastating, but after taking our time to mourn, we kept trying. It took another two and a half years before we got our next positive test. Only to, once more, lose the baby around the eight/nine week mark. The losses chipped away at our hope for a large family, each one taking a tiny bit of it with them. After all, it’s hard to have a heart full of hope when there’s three precious little pieces missing.

We continued trying naturally for two to three more years before we finally got insurance that would help cover the costs of infertility testing and treatment. So, at the beginning of 2017, we began the first of many treatments. Between 2017 and the end of 2018 we underwent at least four unsuccessful IUI cycles and then, finally, our insurance would cover Invitro Fertilization (IVF) and Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET). We still had hope of success, hope that we were heading in the right direction to achieve our dreams.

The first round of IVF was technically a success; we received a positive pregnancy result but that good news was quickly tampered by the news that my hormone levels weren’t where they had wanted them to be. My doctor was concerned that it was an ectopic pregnancy…..it was. He gave me shots of Methotrexate to stop the pregnancy before it got dangerous, and after some regrouping we moved on to our next round of IVF/FET.

The second round of IVF/FET was unsuccessful, our hope taking yet another blow, and we were once more forced to regroup before we continued on.

The third round, however, we got another positive pregnancy result, and this time our numbers looked amazing. The pregnancy was closely monitored by my Reproductive Endocrinologist (RE) until I had hit my second trimester and my doctor, my partner and I thought that we could finally breathe easy. We were wrong.

Our daughter, Talia Aoife-Grace was born still on June 6th, 2019, at 11:46pm, at 21 weeks and 2 days due to an incompetent cervix. She was beautiful and perfect. All 11.6 ounces and 25 cm of her. I delivered her, after a week in the hospital in the hopes that she would hold out a little longer, and I watched her take her first and last breath on my chest.
The hospital was amazing, they let us keep her with us, with the use of a CuddleCot, and even took pictures for us on top of the pictures we were able to take with and of her as well.

Regrouping after we lost our daughter was harder, post partum mixed with depression, anxiety and the inevitable feeling of worthlessness that constantly bombarded me made it hard for us to pick ourselves back up to try again. But we managed it somehow.

After Talia, when we were finally ready, we gathered our hope, the fragile thing that it was, and pushed ourselves through three more rounds of FET; the results being 2 more negatives followed by a chemical pregnancy. After those cycles our insurance would no longer cover anything, so we with our RE and decided to just try cycles using only Letrozole to increase egg production each cycle. 6 cycles of Letrozole later and we still hadn’t had any success. The last Letrozole cycle was at the end of 2019 and our RE suggested we take some time from the medication to see if we can’t try things naturally. To this day, we’re still hopeful that we’ll someday have a little one of our own to hold; but hope is hard to hold on to when you feel like you’re constantly being told no; constantly being told that the one thing in this world that you want more than anything else, is out of reach, possibly forever. Hope is fleeting. We will keep trying, even if hope is hard to come by some days.

That’s why we’re here; right here, right now. We still have a fraction of hope left, and we want to give it one more go. We hope to gather enough to try another round of IVF, possibly one last chance at making our dream come true.