I was born with cardiomyopathy and though I remained stable my whole life, in 2008, I went into heart failure at an alarming rate. I received a heart transplant a few months later, right after my 19th birthday. Today, I am so grateful to be doing incredibly well! Even though pregnancy post-transplant is “possible”, it comes with extremely dangerous risks to mother and baby and too often creates future problems that would impact my ability to be a present and healthy mother. We also wanted to avoid passing down the genetic mutation that caused my heart condition and need for a transplant, so we pursued IVF in 2019 as it allowed us to genetically test our embryos. We knew someone who offered to carry for us at this time, so we felt like we were SO close to our baby. We did 2 cycles of IVF in early 2020 but had to cancel both due to poor response. Cycle #3, we somehow got our one (and only) euploid embryo! Unfortunately, our potential GC changed her mind, so we did 3 more cycles of IVF to try and bank more embryos to continue our surrogate search, but had no success.

After cycle #6, I knew I was done with IVF forever. I was exhausted, and just knew in my heart it was time to stop. After months of planning, we made the decision to transfer our embryo to me on 2/22/22. It resulted in a chemical pregnancy that left us crushed and back at square one. During the time we struggled to grow our family, I had been emailing my companies HR department once a year about the importance of providing fertility coverage, with no success. Only someone without it knows the added stress of revolving fertility treatments around the extremely high costs. While grieving the loss of our only embryo and incredibly difficult journey, I sent my most personal email to HR. I was met with nothing but understanding and equal amounts of frustration that we had gone SO LONG without any coverage. I worked with our benefits department to create a plan that would allow the benefits to be available to everyone… LGBTQ+, single parents, etc. A few months later, I received a call that we were getting coverage! It was such a monumental moment because this would give employees access to family planning options that might have been unattainable before. It was a game changer for us personally as it included donor eggs. We felt excitement and hope for the first time in a very long time. We jumped into the donor egg process and a year and a half later, we have multiple healthy embryos and are hoping to finally find our perfect match to help us grow our family!