Campaign Story

I never thought I would be in a position where I would be publicly exposing such a vulnerable part of my life, but life takes you places you’ll never expect or truly understand. And I think at the very least, spreading awareness on infertility is so important. It makes others know they aren’t alone.

My husband and I started trying to build our family just over 3 years ago. Given the fact I have a diagnosis of PCOS, I always feared I would be the issue when trying to conceive. After trying for a while, we both chose to get testing done. Much to my surprise, I did not have any visible concerns that could prevent me from having a child, but my husband did. We were initially told that it could be possible, so we tried everything. My husband took different medication, I took different medication, diet/exercise changes, tracking cycles, ect. Unfortunately this all failed. We decided to set up an appointment at the fertility clinic. Once we completed all the tests through the clinic, we underwent our first round of IVF. We got the call after my retrieval that my husbands semen was worse off than expected, so we only had 1 fertilized egg make it to the embryo stage. We were so hopeful this embryo would make it and we’d have at least a chance. We did not find out that our only embryo did not make it to the final stage of growth until we were already on the road to the clinic the morning of our transfer. At this time we met with our doctor who was not very optimistic about our chances of having a child together.

This was obviously devastating for the both of us, but really took a toll on my husband. After much consideration, we chose to go through with a donor. Although our doctor was much more optimistic about this decision, it was an extra financial cost we didn’t anticipate. We ended up buying vials from the same donor (a retired donor). We then underwent 2 IUI’s (unsuccessful) and one more round of IVF. Fortunately, the last round of IVF was successful, which resulted in our beautiful baby girl. She is the absolute light of my life and such a blessing. We are so thankful.

We always envisioned having two children that would complete our family. We have only 1 more frozen embryo, which is our daughter’s last chance of gaining a sibling with the same DNA as herself (and in general since the donor we used was retired and out of vials and we do not plan to go through another full round of IVF). It is very rare for people to have 100% success rate with all of their embryos, but we are very hopeful. We plan to go through the frozen transfer next month (September). But we found out the cost of our transfer will be much more than we expected. And to be quite honest, our IVF journey from before really took a big hit on our finances, which we are still trying to recover from now. We just didn’t know that these types of supports were available at the time.

With all that being said, IVF is a journey I do not wish on anyone. It is very tough on your mental and physical health. But when successful, it is so worth it. We would appreciate any financial support we can get, but if anything I just wanted to spread more awareness to fertility issues and how that can impact a family. Thank you so much for reading about our story!