I missed my deadline for this story.
(It came 10 days before another surgery, this one long-scheduled.)
I dont miss deadlines.
Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath
But IVF doesnt care about your plans.
You probably know someone whos going through IVF right now or has in the past.
Maybe youve gone through it yourself.
Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath
Infertility is incredibly common, impactingone in sixadults worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
As a result, there are all sorts of misconceptions about how IVF actually works.
Misconception #1: That it alwaysdoeswork.
IVF accounted for almost90,000 live birthsin the United States in 2021.
Some reproductive endocrinologists don’t think this study offers a fully comprehensive view of IVFincluding my own doctor.
Plusand this is a big plusthey all had high-quality genetically-tested embryos to use in the first place.
Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath
Thats certainly been the case for my husband, Rahul, and me.
I was 36 when we first visited a fertility clinic after many months of trying to conceive naturally.
By then I was 37; we assumed Id be pregnant shortly thereafter.
Im 39 now, and we have no clear end in sight.
And Im not alone.
They bravely shared their stories to create clearer pictures of the realities of this processbecause there isnt just one.
And there are certainly versions that are much easier than the ones youre about to read about.
But those arent the stories Im reporting here.
Most have spent several years going through treatments, and somelike meare still doing them today.
We need to be sure there arent laws or precedent for treating embryos as living children.
But education is important, too.
So, if you feel comfortable, share your infertility story.
Although infertility impacts one in six people, theres still a stigma and people dont always talk about it.
The Alabama decision showed a lack of knowledge about reproduction, which is really concerning.
It was a challenging road for me, the baby-making road, Jennifer AnistontoldAllurein a December 2022 cover interview.
I was going through IVF, drinking Chinese teas, you name it.
I was throwing everything at it.
That ship has sailed, said Aniston.
Yes, it was sometimes triggering to transcribe all of these stories.
Theres no way to soften the blow of a failed round.
Its soul-crushingespecially because there isnt always a clear reason why it didnt work.
Simply put, IVF is a life-changing process, says Dr. Chatzicharalampous.
It impacts and alters every area of your life when youre going through it.
I have to know whats going on in their lives because IVF impacts all of it.
It is completely all-consuming.
The fact that these feelings can make people feel very, very alone.
It takes a lot for some people to feel comfortable opening up.
And then theres the financial toll.
That cost was around $5,000 for a batch of eight embryos at my New York City-based clinic.
Take a ride on the railroadto an acupuncture appointment that costs $150.
Land at the pharmacy for a new monthly supply of nutritional supplements for $600.
The truth is that IVF is an imperfect science, Dr. Kashani explains.
But, remember, the first IVF baby is only 45 years old.
Were still learning about this process every day, says Dr. Kashani.
Many couplesincluding my husband and meare left living in limbo for years, sometimes even a decade.
And that leads me to yet another almost universal theme in this reporting: the trauma.
Going through this process month after month means living with uncertainty and grief month after month.
Eight, like me, arent sure what the future will hold.
These stories have been edited and condensed for clarity.
I was 30, went off birth control immediately, and we started trying.
I had my first fertility clinic appointment in January 2022.
We did one more IUI that failed before moving on to IVF.
At that point, I thought, Great.
Ill give myself some shots, and itll all be good.
Id always thought of IVF as the worst-case scenario.
You know, Worst case, Ill just do IVF.
I never thought to ask the question, What if it doesnt work?
Can I even have children?
That wasnt a possibility in my mind.
But then IVF didnt work.
My son is now nine weeks old.
Two of the three failed transfers ended in early miscarriages, where I had to have D&Cs.
The other just straight-up failed.
My arm went numb and I couldnt control it for about half an hour.
It was so scary.
After my second transfer failed, I started to picture my life without kids.
I started to wonder what that would look like.
It was a really confusing time.
It was also hard to put my whole life on hold while watching everyone elses move forward.
Everyone knows that parenting can be hard.
But my infertility trial?
Other people can just have sex a couple of times and then have a baby.
Im like, What is that?
Infertility also made me really messed up mentally during my whole pregnancy.
I was constantly thinking something was going to go wrong.
Even now, even though I gave birth to my son, Im still processing the trauma.
Its not something that just leaves you the moment the baby is born.
I hope that one day Ill be better from all this.
Just remember, you know what you went through and you know who you are.
But three years later, we are not pregnant.
Ive done three egg retrievals and had three failed transfers.
From there, it was just one disappointing event after another, blow by blow.
I just had surgery for endometriosis.
Lo and behold, they found endometriosis everywhere in my reproductive area.
No doctor ever brought endometriosis up to me, even though Ive had painful periods for my whole life.
Now I feel like my trust is a little broken.
Why wouldn’t they bring this up from the very beginning?
There have been so many unexpected twists and turns throughout this process.
Were looking into surrogacy.
I’m just like, Oh my God, I need to get back to me for a second.
I need to heal my body, my mind, and my spirit.
Im calling it The Great Reset.
Im grappling with the fact that Ive had a chronic illness my whole life and didnt even know.
Would I have done anything differently?
I also wish someone would have said in the beginning: you should probably mentally prepare for this.
You will probably have to do more than one retrieval and more than one transfer.
I had built up this bubble of hope that it would be one and done.
That we would go on to two kids, maybe three kids.
The person who started three years ago is not the same person I am now.
I was filled with hope back then and now its just a little glimmer.
It’s not as easy as some people may make it seem on social media.
Even the doctors make it seem easy sometimes.
Going through IVF has taught me that two truths can be true at once.
Id always approached life with more of a black-and-white attitude: Youre either happy or youre sad.
But this has taught me that so many emotions can live together.
I am a fundamentally different person than I was when we started.
But maybe its a blessing, too.
Going through infertility forces you to know yourself and protect yourself.
And I think that skill is a good one to carry into the next decade.
I think you need that as a mom.
We knew so little going into it.
I mean, I even asked our doctor, Do we need to be the same blood punch in?
No, he said.
A female body is a body.
Picking the sperm was not easy.
It was very emotional.
At the time, it seemed like the hardest thing ever.
But it turned out to be just a blip on the screen.
Once we had the sperm, we were able to do things in tandem.
We transferred our first viable embryoone without the dominant gene.
I couldnt believe it when it failed.
It put me in a very bad place.
We did another two transfers, and they failed.
I remember that Thanksgiving, I was devastated.
I felt like I had nothing to be thankful for.
I was so upset.
Thats when we started doing more research on our own.
I ended up consulting with an immunologist and going to a natural doctor who also does acupuncture.
She said I had to stop eating carbs and sugar and cut back on caffeine.
I started taking fish oil and lots of vitamins and supplements to reduce inflammation.
I said, This is the last one.
Ithasto work, or we are going back to the drawing board to find a new doctor.
Turns out it was just a UTI, but I was still scared and on edge.
Fortunately, I went on to have an easy delivery and a beautiful, healthy baby girl.
The truth of the matter is building a family can be so hard and isolating.
I give people a lot of credit who are doing it…and doing it again and again.
My daughter is so strong…she is truly our little embryo who could.
And we see that same strength and will in everything she does today.
I got pregnant right away, but it was an ectopic pregnancy.
It was super scary and I lost a fallopian tube.
It severely impacted our romantic relationship.
My husband and I were so traumatized during our first wedding anniversary that it tarnished the whole experience.
I didnt tell anyone about the ectopic except my mom and one friend.
I felt like my body had failed me and I couldnt trust it anymore.
We skipped IUI and got right into the process.
But it didnt work right away.
We did two failed rounds, then switched clinics.
I was willingly pumping myself with all kinds of hormones day after day, a willing participant in trauma.
I felt like a science experimentall this poking and prodding in the most intimate of places.
I was also incredibly jealous of other women who got pregnant.
She just hadnt known how to tell me.
And my heart broke into so many pieces right there in the clinic.
When will it be my turn?
I just lost it.
I lost friends from my childhood who didnt understand.
And I still struggled once I became pregnant.
I was waiting for the other shoe to drop right up until my daughter was born.
But then, ironically enough, I got pregnant with our second daughter on our own, by ourselves.
It was miraculousbut I was furious.
For three years plus, my identity had been the girl with fertility issues.
In some ways, I wore those struggles like a badge of honor.
Then suddenly, it happened just like that?
I felt like a fraud.
Its a work in progress.
I know Ive become a much better health advocate for myself.
Every time something didnt work during treatments, I would ask my doctor, Can we try this instead?
Now I know that doing your own research is the best way forward.
Its a weird, twisted blessing.
Through her, Ive learned what unconditional love is like.
Thats what I want for my child, toowhich is why this journey has been so challenging for me.
Theyre supposed to develop in your reproductive years, so that was pretty early.
Ive had threemyomectomy surgeriesto remove the fibroids since then, the most recent one in 2023.
He said, Forget about it, your uterus is way too compromised to have a child.
you oughta have a hysterectomy.
And I was like, What?
So my husband and I tried naturally for about five years, but nothing happened.
At 39, we decided to start IVF.
And I thought, Wait, what?
I never even thought that was a possibility.
That was my first introduction to the roller coaster of IVF.
But that has not been my experience.
After my first canceled round, I decided to take some time off.
I was really thrown by that failure, and confused about why it hadnt worked.
After a year or so, I was ready to try another retrieval with a different protocol.
This time, I got enough eggs to do a retrieval, and considered it a true miracle.
We got four embryos, but then the transfer didnt work.
This time, we switched doctors and got on a whole new protocoland the transfer worked.
But I continued to spot after that, which caused a lot of anxiety.
Fast forward three more weeks.
I had never seen that much blood in my life.
It was the scariest thing.
I really credit myself for what happened next, and I credit God.
In that moment, I thought to myself, Im going to survive this.
Im not about to bleed out and die in this house.
And I was determined to save my baby.
I called 911, and they brought me to the emergency room.
I was gushing blood.
The ER doctor came in and said, I’m sorry.
Your cervix is opening, and you’re losing the baby.
And then he told me that I had to go home to miscarry…yes, really.
Even though they told me I was losing the baby.
So there I was, in the middle of all my chaos and my trauma.
I was losing my baby.
It was the middle of the night.
I was by myself.
My husband was on his way, but he was not there yet.
And I was like, Now you’re throwing politics into this?
Like, what are you talking about?
And then they gave me morphine.
When I woke up in the morning, I stood up and my head started spinning.
And thats when I thought to myself, No, Im not leaving.
Im going to advocate for myself.
What happens if I start bleeding again?
By the time my husband got there, they did another ultrasound.
By that point there was no heartbeatso they were finally able to do the D&C.
Now we have two embryos left.
Im currently prepping for another embryo transfer, which is next week.
I feel like Im always holding my breath.
But thats been my whole experience with infertility.
Its that constant ringing thought in the back of my head, you know?
And thats how I feel about this transfer Im going through right now: It could be a miracle.
You just never know.
The doctors discovered I had a really thin uterine lining.
After three failed IUIs with Letrozole, we decided well just do IVF.
We figured it would be easy…bank some embryos, do IVF, and its gonna work.
We started with a hysteroscopy to see if we could find a reason for my thin lining.
Everything looked fine, so we went straight to our first retrieval.
I got eight genetically-normal embryos from that retrieval, which was great.
But then our first two transfers failed, and my doctor suggested we use a surrogate.
I was like, What?
It didnt feel right, so I made an appointment for a second opinion.
In the meantime, we started gathering information on surrogacy and interviewed with a lot of different agencies.
So we did another retrieval, followed it up with a fresh transfer, and it workedthats my son.
I was happy but anxious about the pregnancy, so I was doing ultrasounds every week at work.
At nine weeks, there was no more heartbeat.
It was a lot.
Were on a waiting list for a surrogacy agency, but weve continued to do transfers in the meantime.
Fortunately, we have enough embryos to keep doing transfersmaking embryos is not our issue.
But theyve all failed.
We just completed our 11th transfer.
And again, it was unsuccessful.
For the first time, I think I might be done with transfers.
Ive never felt that way before, so now I think were just going to wait for the surrogate.
I dont want to be greedy, I just really want him to have a sibling.
AISHA B. I continued to suffer for years.
I had stage four endometriosis.
The doctor recommended trying IVF immediately to give me the best chances of conceiving.
That was the beginning of my 10-year IVF journey.
I witnessed and experienced the evolution of IVF.
Growing up in the UK, I felt othered.
It seemed I was the only person my age who was living with a debilitating chronic illness.
I had many moments of, Where do I belong?
People often ask me if Im happy with the life Im living now, and the answer is yes.
Im no longer in limbo, and I feel so free after stopping.
Of course, leaving the process without a baby is also very nuanced.
Moving forwardas opposed to moving onhasnt been easy.
You arenot obligedto explore alternate paths to parenthood if you dont want to.
Years ago, the narrative was: Do not give up until you get your baby.
Keep going, because it will happen eventually.
But it didnt happen for me, no matter what I tried.
Even though its completely out of anyones control.
Looking back, I see how layered my long fertility journey was.
My relationships suffered a lot, too.
I avoided people and events because they were so triggering.
I look back at photos of myself during that 10-year stretch, and I dont even recognize myself.
I dont see the Aisha that I am today.
They all suffered as well, taking on my sadness as if it was their own.
I miscarried, while my sister carried her child through to full term.
Her entire pregnancy was impacted and overshadowed by my loss.
It was a really hard and sad time for all of us.
My other miscarriages were incredibly painful as well.
I experienced a great deal of trauma after each pregnancy loss.
Those commenters didnt understand how triggering that question can beand how adoption is complex.
It isnt a quick fix for childlessness.
Stopping trying to conceive was the best thing I didI put myself first.
Prioritizing your healthphysical, mental, emotional, spiritualis a good enough reason to stop.
If I had to give anyone advice, it would be, Stop when youre ready.
I pulled the old IUD at 32, but nothing happened for a year.
After two more years of that, I went back to the clinic.
The doctor, an older man, told me, I can get you pregnant in a second.
I didnt like his cockiness, but we went ahead with three rounds of IUI.
My diagnosis was unexplained infertility and the doctor said it was time to do IVF.
The feeling of complete failure was so shitty at the time.
The doctor prescribed such high doses of medication I ended up having 38 eggs retrieved at once.
From the 20 that fertilized, we got six embryos.
But I ended up with horrible OHSS, the worst pain in my life.
My husband was traveling for work and I managed to get to the clinic on my own.
The doctor drained five liters of fluid from my abdomen, filling one big glass bottle after another.
It looked like something out ofFrankenstein.
When our first transfer didnt take, I said, Thats it.
I need to give my body a break, and Im done with this doctor.
Our marriage was suffering under the stress of IVF.
We had a new apartment, and I had a new job.
We took a year to work on ourselves and our marriage.
But I started losing faith in her after two more failed transfers.
When I finally got pregnant, she misinterpreted a scan and thought I was having conjoined twins.
Now we have a healthy boy, and weve decided to have only one kid.
We have no embryos left, and the OHSS was the worst pain of my life.
I never want to go through that again.
Also, my husbands job requires so much travel, which made the early years really hard and exhausting.
We had our son during COVID, so we didnt have proper childcare.
But to everyone still going through it, my advice is to listen to your intuition.
If you dont trust your doctor, switch.
My husband is 11 1/2 years older than I am.
Were in it together, but he already has a daughter, so I have a stepdaughter.
Hes done the full family bit, which is something Im still longing for.
When we finally decided to go to a fertility clinic, the doctor was surprisingly kind.
He wanted to put me on Letrozole for three months, but he also thought I might have endometriosis.
They said thats not how its done; you have to do the drugs first.
But the doctor relented, and surgery revealed I had endometriosis in three areas.
Yet even after the surgery, I didnt get pregnant.
Setbacks can make you crazy.
And my husband wasnt sure he wanted to do IVF.
But he wanted to have another child.
We went back and forth, and finally, we both just surrendered.
In the first round, we got 22 eggs.
Fourteen fertilized, but we only got one viable embryo.
It had Down syndrome, so we did another retrieval.
We got a few embryos from that round and did a fresh transfer, but it didnt work.
We did a frozen transfer after that; it didnt work, either.
Im sick of doctors and I need something to love.
Were getting a fucking cat.
Right away, this felt more up my alley because of the holistic perspective.
What is the root cause of all this?
Then I did it again three weeks later because they said its more likely to work that way.
But about a month ago, that clinic called.
Im like, Great, let me just load another line of credit.
Weve now spent $250,000 trying to get pregnant.
This whole thing can be so exhausting, alternating between grief and hope.
I always say, When you grieve a death, you know someone died.
You know theyre not coming back.
But with infertility, you’re walking with grief.
Every month you ovulate, you also have a possibility of life again.
That seemed about average for my friend group.
I didnt feel like I was waiting too long.
A referral is a requirement in Ontario, where we live.
The fertility doctor also didnt seem overly concerned.
Canadian clinics get a certain number of government-funded IVF cycles and ours just happened to have one available.
We jumped at the opportunity.
We were devastated, as wed already done everything to prepare for the retrieval.
So my husband and I made the snap decision to pay for it out of pocket.
It was $10,000…money we were saving for a home renovation.
We ended up getting five embryos.
And then my doctor says, If you want to go to acupuncture, go.
But if you dont want to, dont.
Figuring out who to listen to has been really confusing.
When we did a second retrieval, we got 16 eggs and four embryos.
After two more failed transfers, we had just two embryos left.
I was the natural candidate, but I didnt even try for it.
Now here I am, three years later, still in the same boat.
I feel really stuck.
We switched to a new fertility doctor who’s a bit more forward-thinking in his approach.
So, yeah…I dont know.
Until the surgery, my husband and I are in what were calling our selfish era.
Were taking a trip to Portugal.
If we want something for the house, were buying it.
We have nothing else to plan for or look forward to right now.
Were just trying to live in the present moment.
Im a doctor, and the place where I worked offered egg freezing.
It was the cool thing to do.
All the young female doctors would go to these egg freezing happy hours.
So I started on this year and a half-long journey to bank as many eggs as I could.
It actually wasnt a hard conversation to have.
We werent engaged yet, but we just knew.
When you know, you know.
We did not have great numbers.
I did five egg retrievals, for a grand total of 17 eggs, and got five embryos total.
So we were like, cool, and then didnt think about it for two years.
We thought of those embryos as a security deposit in the bank.
We took a pause on everything and got engaged and then married.
After a few months, we went back to the fertility clinic.
It was awful, but I thought, Good thing I have those five embryos.
We finally had them genetically tested, and three of the five turned out normal.
We put one in and it didnt work.
Then we put another one in and it also didnt work.
Then we tried to put the third one in, but it didn’t survive to thaw.
At that point we were back to square one.
It was so hard.
We started talking about a child-free life.
I started to wonder, Do I only want kids because I was told I cant have one?
It got so existential.
And it forced reflection.
We decided to start down the adoption path.
And in the meantime, we were still trying naturally.
But our intimate relationship went off the rails.
Everything was focused on my cycle.
I did end up getting a positive pregnancy test in early 2021, but it didnt last.
I miscarried at nine weeks.
When the world opened back up, we went back to the clinic and started again.
The vibes were bad from the start.
Our doctor did not even acknowledge the awfulness that had gone down, so we switched doctors.
I don’t think this is going to happen for you.
You should think about other ways to become a parent.
It was a come-to-Jesus moment.
But it was so meaningful.
Thats when we decided to use an egg donor.
For some people, thats a big decision point.
I’m still a part of it.
That connection is there.
It all comes out in the wash. A baby is born and that’s your baby.
Choosing the egg donor was a Tinder-esque process.
Im Vietnamese and I wanted someone who looks like me.
I think being Asian limits the pool greatly.
There just arent a lot of Asian egg donors out there, which was hard.
But really, you laugh so you dont cry.
We eventually found an Asian donor and got four embryos, two of which passed the genetic test.
But both of those embryo transfers failed, which was even harder.
I was like, Okay, whats next?
I dissociated so much from what I was actually feeling.
We chose a second egg donor.
This is when we actually started putting in a concerted effort for adoption.
We found a third donor at the same time.
At this point the pool of Asian egg donors had gotten smaller and smaller.
I remember thinking that the third one looked the least like me, but we were getting desperate.
We got two genetically normal embryos from her.
The first transfer ended up being a chemical pregnancy.
We were running this process parallel to adoption and I was getting so tired.
It was a lot.
We had been at it for seven years.
Id had one year of regular periods during COVID and everything else had been modulated with hormones.
We decided to do one more transferand it worked.
I didn’t even tell people I was pregnant.
I didnt believe it myself.
I called the baby the situation.
We had a situation-moon instead of a baby-moon.
I was so afraid it would go away since everything else had up until that point.
People don’t really talk about what happens when you get pregnant after infertility.
It was pervasive anxiety for me.
Of course I love him, but theres still trauma there.
When I found out my sister-in-law was accidentally pregnant with their third child, I broke into tears.
The repercussions are long.
We want to grow our family, but I dont think we can go through this again.
I ate healthily and exercised regularly.
I got enough sleep, I drank responsibly, I didn’t do drugs, I had protected sex.
By all accounts, I was primed for pregnancy.
It should have come easilyas easily as it had seemed to for everyone else.
But a few years into our marriage, it wasn’t happening.
No Clomid, no IUI, no fooling around.
It was not fun.
It was actually excruciating.
I couldn’t exercise, which was a huge part of my life.
I did all the peripheral things: teas, tinctures, supplements, acupuncture, cupping, tapping.
If I heard of a remedy to increase the chance of pregnancy, I did it.
It took over my life.
But it was going to be worth it.
After multiple failed embryo transfers and miscarriages, it wasnt worth it.
It was time to stop, to find ourselves again.
The worst part was, I felt completely isolated.
I would love the childbirth scars, the saggy breasts.
Its been five years now since I stopped trying to have a baby.
After my final IVF cycle, I had tried to find support groups.
I scoured the internet, reached out to fertility clinics, called therapists who specialize in infertility.
I help them normalize their situation and their response to it.
I help them reframe their negative self-talk.
We talk openly about the overwhelming sadness and anger that they have no other outlet for.
Fast-forward to October 2021, age 39.
I found a sperm donor and did everything my clinic told me to.
My clinic wouldnt let me go straight to IVF, so I did an IUI first.
The next month, I went to IVF.
We transferred it and it worked, but then the pregnancy ended in miscarriage.
After the D&C, I flew to Grand Cayman and cried in the ocean by myself.
I wanted my doctor to switch up my protocol.
It finally worked, but then it was a chemical pregnancy.
Because I’m like, Why did that have to happen?
On my 11th transfer, we put in three terrible-quality embryosthats all I had left to work with.
I was at the Fuck it, try anything stage.
She told me, Its not medically sound to continue on this path.
If this doesnt work, you will need to look to an alternative option.
And I was thinking, How did I get here?
I’m now forty-fucking-two years old, and there’s been nothing wrong with me that we know of.
And now you’re telling me, at this very moment, that this is my last transfer.
Can we talk about that cruel reality?
I was a raging lunatic.
I downed an entire bottle of Casamigos.
I was trashed in my apartment, by myself, bleeding.
Turns out, it was positive.
I said, Shut the F up!
And my nurse said, Maybe this kid just needed the tequila to jump-start him.
But it wasn’t all rainbows and flowers after that.
I should’ve been ecstatic, but my memory and brain told me otherwise.
Now my son is 10 weeks old.
Im grateful hes here and healthy.
My advice for other women is: Don’t ever stop.
If you want a baby, don’t freaking stop.
IVF is an out-of-body experience and it really messes with your psyche.
It robbed me of our journey of joy.
Even so, I’m grateful my son is here and healthy.
So dont take yourself out of the ring.
Let someone else do that if need be, but dont give up on yourself.
I was moving through life, and didnt think I had any fertility issues.
That was a big blow.
We had to get our finances in order before we could begin the process.
The first transfer didnt work.
Just try IVF again.
That didnt make sense to us.
I remember in the back of my head, thinking, Thats bullshit.
We took a pause.
My diet became a big focus, too.
Even though I didnt think it was bad, I had normal gut-health issues like IBS and consistent bloating.
It didnt work, either.
I took immune-suppressing drugs to quiet those cells, and finally got pregnant after my third transfer.
But I miscarried, which was devastating.
It was another miscarriage.
Thenjust two months laterI got pregnant naturally, with no immune-suppressing drugs.
As much as I was excited, it was a huge punch in the face.
Now I want people to know you get a choice on how you are going to define your journey.
I was never infertile, ever.
I was just dealing with fertility issues.
Mine started six weeks after we got married, when I was hit by a drunk driver.
I had to have two spinal surgeries.
We started trying to conceive a year after that; I was 31.
When nothing happened, I went to the doctor and was given a very workable diagnosis: male factor.
The doctors told me to skip IUI and go straight to IVF.
This is a slam dunk, they said.
Youre going to have a soccer team of kids.
We were just supposed to be dealing with the male factor, but the transfers still kept failing.
I had to leave my job as a high school teacher because I was missing so much class time.
We eventually decided to pursue a dual track: Look into using a gestational carrier while still doing transfers.
He had never missed a transfer, but this time my mother had to take me.
The doctors were trying a different protocol.
My doctor said, Im just throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks.
And thats what finally worked.
My daughter is now seven years old.
He felt damaged from all the years of trauma.
Or was I going to resent him more for not letting me try?
He decided to let me move forward with it, probably thinking it wasn’t going to work.
The first try failed.
Around seven weeks, one of the twins stopped growing.
The other is my 10-month-old boy.
It will feel like this is the child you were meant to have and the rest will make sense.
And I really do believe that.
IVF became my life for so long that it changed me and sent me in a new direction.
Im honest with our members.
One night I had a full Britney Spears moment and chopped off all my hair.
I tell everyone that IVF is not just a clinical issue, it’s a relationship issue.
Its a psychological issue.
It’s an emotional issueall part of each person’s narrative.
We got engaged a year and a half in, but we thought, Weve got time.
I felt really young at heart and just didnt think I would have fertility issues.
Even so, when I was around 40, I went for some fertility testing.
I felt like it couldnt hurt.
They told me, Everythings fine, no action needed.
But I wasnt satisfied with that answer.
So I went private, which in the UK, where I live, means you have to pay.
And thats when I discovered my AMH level was extremely low.
And that caused me to sort of lose faith in myself and my body.
I went to a naturopath and tried all sorts of natural things, including diet changes and acupuncture.
But my AMH levels werent improving and nothing was happening.
At that point wed been trying to get pregnant the old-fashioned way for about 14 months.
Everyone advised me to just give in and try IVF.
I really didnt want toIm needle-phobic and hated the ideabut I ultimately went for it.
Sadly, that wasnt the magic wand and nothing else I tried was, either.
I think that filling your mind with too many things, too many I shoulds is not healthy.
I didnt allow myself to have a drink or enjoy myself for so long, and for what?
All it did was create an undercurrent of stress.
Ive sort of been forced to let it go, but I feel better.
Theres a sense of freedom in that.
Now weve moved onto one last option for us: donor eggs.
I was really against using them at first; I wasnt ready to give up on my own eggs.
It felt like I had failed.
But after taking some time off to think about this next phase, Ive let those feelings go.
Trusting the divine timing or whatever.
It still isnt easy, though.
Starting everything up again after taking a break has caused a lot of traumatic feelings to resurface.
Its like reality has suddenly hit: Okay, were doing this.
This is actually happening.
Were using donor eggs.
I wasnt going to have a child just for the sake of it.
I wanted to do it with someone I really wanted to have a family with.
And Im grateful that I found that person.
So now Im doing my best to get into a good mindset about this new reality moving forward.
Ultimately, Im really grateful that this option exists and Im hopeful that it will work.
I didnt think it was going to be that hard.
I was 31 when I started IUI.
At every appointment, they said, Oh wow, you have so many eggs!
You could have twins!
I did nine rounds of IUI.
Im five feet four, and was probably 180 pounds.
It was COVID, so I used the time of working from home to focus on my health.
I lost 40 pounds.
By January 2021, when I went back to the doctor, they decided to immediately do IVF.
They knew I would probably overstimulate because of the PCOS, and I did.
My first egg retrieval, I got 41 eggs.
We ended up with 16 embryos, and they did the first transfer on Mothers Day.
I thought it was very symbolic, but sadly, it didnt work.
The next two transfers also failed.
It was emotionally draining.
At that point my husband suggested surrogacy and I just lost it.
I wanted to have that experience if I could.
So I started doing my own research and advocating for myself: Should I be on this?
Should I change my prenatals?
What should I be doing differently?
Finally, my doctors referred me toDr.
He now focuses on what he calls more conservative approaches to infertility.
He wasnt cheap and didnt take insurance.
I took all this info to my doctor, and we ended up doingintralipid infusionsto curb the NK cells.
They also had me change my diet to gluten-free and dairy-free.
I still didnt get pregnant.
Thats when I decided to switch primary doctors and push for more tests.
With my new doctor, I had a hysteroscopy and theERPeak test, and took several other new medications.
Thats when things finally turned around.
I decided on two embryosand he was right.
I also got high blood pressure.
In the end, all the struggles made me appreciate my kids so much more.
Of course, I dont want to go back to those IVF years.
They were so hard, for me and my husband.
Theres hope for everyone and so much light.
Just remember to advocate for yourself.
I had five miscarriages before beginning IVF in 2022.
We were lucky to have one successful egg retrieval, with 22 eggs and six genetically-tested normal embryos.
But then I went on to have three failed transfers and my sixth miscarriage.
My doctor put me on immune treatment right away.
I also had three hysteroscopies and a laparoscopy.
I did everything my doctors told me to do.
Even so, some of the doctors made me feel I was to blame.
One told me running was the cause of my miscarriages.
I’m not a runner.
I’ve never run in my life.
In February 2023, we finally had a successful transfer.
We heard a heartbeat.
Then I had a subchorionic hematoma, when blood collects under the chorion membrane during pregnancy.
Then we lost the baby at seven weeks.
I cried and I struggled.
They lack the empathy to understand your grief.
Ive struggled with support during this time, and have lost a lot of friends.
I was not well mentally after all the setbacks.
I now realize I was on autopilot.
I realized that doing so had led me to suppress my emotions because I couldnt handle the pain.
Shes an infertility patient herself and had had multiple failed transfers.
Going on Zoloft has been a big shift in this whole journey for me.
When I cleared it with my fertility doctor, he was so surprised I wasnt already on it.
He said many women like me, with repeated pregnancy losses, were on an antidepressant.
Right now we have two embryos left from our egg retrieval.
I have a new fertility doctor.
Im at a point where I dont even know if I want to be pregnant anymore.
But Im also starting to realize that may be the trauma talking.
I think its taken over my mind.
Its a confusing time.
Then it all goes out the window.
Youre left just hoping and praying for one kid, and thats fine.
I was 35 and wanted to have a baby someday, so I froze my eggs.
Infertility unfolded from there, much like a Pandoras box.
When I first froze my eggs 10 years ago, it wasnt a popular thing.
I got eight, but no one told me that wasnt enough.
So I went about my life.
I found a sperm donor and did a bunch of IUIs, but none of them worked.
Eventually I thawed my eggs, and only four of the eight made it through the thawing process.
My clinic at the time refused to transfer mosaics, so I was like, What?
How is this possible?
How do I have nothing to show for anything Ive done so far?
I switched clinics, and we did two more retrievals, but nothing happened.
I wasnt getting any good quality eggs.
I switched doctors within my clinic, and he diagnosed me with diminished ovarian reserve.
Again, nothing worked.
Finally, I decided to use a donor embryo.
Ive got good-quality embryos, lets go!
But the first transfer failed, and the second was a chemical pregnancy.
They found stage three endo.
I ended up going with a new egg and sperm donor after that.
Much to my surprise, that transfer stuck, but nearly seven weeks later, I miscarried.
I was gushing blood and walked myself to the emergency room.
It was a new circle of hell.
My second transfer from that batch of donor eggs failed, too, so I changed clinics again.
The first failed, and the second ended in a chemical pregnancy.
At that point, I was like, What more can happen?
Finally, a friend of mine said, I think you better call it.
Youre destroying your physical self.
I’m thankful she said that because I probably wouldve kept going.
I went with a surrogate, in the end.
She got pregnant on the first try.
People who got pregnant easily can say that, but not me.
The trauma of infertility doesnt just disappear, but Im working on it.
We did the career thing first; hes an engineer and Im an occupational therapist.
We were heads-down working, saving for a house, all that stuff that you do.
Then in 2020, when I was 35, we decided we were ready to start a family.
I went in for a regular checkup and mentioned that I was having heavy periods.
A quick ultrasound revealed I might have endometriosis.
We did some timed-intercourse cycles, and an IUI cycle that didn’t work.
Then we moved onto IVF, and our first egg retrieval was at the end of 2021.
We ended up with three embryos.
Our first two transfers failed, and by then we had used up my husbands insurance coverage.
We got a couple good embryos.
At that point we decided to try a third transfer with our last embryo from the first retrieval.
I was taking thousands of supplements.
Id basically given up everything in the world to make this work, but that transfer failed, too.
I was completely crushed.
I thought, We cant keep playing small ball here, dabbling in just one thing.
We started pursuing surrogacy, and also decided to do one more retrieval with an in-connection doctor.
But she backed out shortly after we matched.
We reposted and received another response.
On my birthday, she texted me that she had just thrown up.
Finding out shes pregnant has led to this weird mix of emotions.
Its been a roller coaster, honestly.
Im happy, of course, but also cant help but wonder, Why isnt it me?
Theres a bit of unexpected grief there.
And what do I even do now?
If I were pregnant, I would be researching what to eat and how to prepare.
Do I say, like, We’re pregnant, I’m pregnant, Our surrogate is pregnant?
Its all very new.
Also, I havent completely given up the idea that I will someday carry a child myself.
She suspected I had low ovarian reserve and recommended my husband and I go straight to a fertility specialist.
The world shut down, and so did my clinic.
This cant be happening, I thought.
I searched Chicago for any clinic that might still be open.
Shes an IVF patient herself, who has also been through many transfers.
We didnt get any normal embryos after the first retrieval.
Not having anything to work with up front is a new kind of hell.
But I remember thinking, Im in this for the long haul, so lets keep going.
Then, literally 20 minutes after telling them, I started bleeding.
The miscarriage was devastating.
Somehow we picked up the pieces.
We just kept going and going.
I kept saying, We are not stopping.
We are just not stopping.
Its the one thing I wasnt willing to give up on.
I have no desire to run a marathon, but this was my own personal marathon.
Not every woman has that option.
But I wont say that didnt come without consequences.
My husband and I struggled for a long time.
Thats how badly I wanted it.
I was willing to give up everything it took.
I was just so in it.
There I was on the side of the road, sobbing uncontrollably, thinking, My baby is gone.
But she was fine.
I now have a beautiful 10-month-old daughter.
I can’t explain what we really did differently on that last round.
They say that happens sometimesyou just keep going and it works at some point.
Were both just over the moon in love with her.
But for all the joy, the trauma is still there.
Id love for her to have one sibling.
Im going to do a couple more retrievals to see what we can get.
I ended up with three beautiful sons, one by a surrogate and two I gave birth to.
IVF is a wild ride.
Its not a perfect science.
Yeah, I do.
I was 29 and newly married when we first started trying.
For whatever reason, I had this idea in my mind that it wasnt going to happen easily.
But I got pregnant in the second month.
Unfortunately, I miscarried at six weeks.
After about eight or nine months where nothing happened, though, we went to a fertility clinic.
They found a couple issues with my husbands spermlow motility and morphologyso suggested we start with IUI.
We did two rounds that failed before we moved onto IVF.
Fortunately, producing good-quality embryos did not prove to be an issue.
But getting them to stick around did.
Month after month, my transfers kept failing, and the conversations we had with doctors were unending.
I even tried Viagra to increase the thickness of my uterus lining.
Who even knew that was a thing?
Eight failed transfers later, our doctors suggested surrogacy.
The unknown of surrogacy was obviously a little daunting.
We met a few potential people, then made a match with a woman we really liked.
It was a gut feeling with herlike, Okay, this could work.
Around the same time that we matched with her, I got pregnant on my own.
But it turned into an ectopic pregnancy soon after my positive test.
As the ectopic pregnancy was playing out, our surrogate did her first embryo transfer, and it worked.
Then she miscarried around six weeks, and that rocked our world.
Of course we knew that miscarriage was possibleits always possiblebut we really didnt see it going that way.
After all, we had such a unique shared experience.
We tried again with the surrogate, and again she miscarried.
At that point it became a question of how far were we willing to go with this.
The surrogate is the end of the road, and we were there.
We put in two embyros this time, a boy and a girl.
They both took, but then around six weeks, one stopped growing.
The other was a healthy boy.
You flush out your system and then reintroduce the estrogen to get everything moving again.
Its hellmenopause is no joke.
But I wanted to do it to be sure we were exhausting all of our options.
I wanted to throw everything in and see what sticks.
I wanted to give it one last shot.
I didnt think it would work, but it did.
So, yes, I was pregnant at the same time as our surrogate.
The babies were born three months apart.
Two years after the boys were born, I decided I was not done building a family.
I did another transfer, but it failed.
PTSD is something that I wasnt expecting to hit me quite as hard as it did.
Anyone going through IVF should know PTSD is real.
You cant just shed all the struggles.
In my case, Im very thankful it all worked outthe positives outweigh the negatives.
I came out the other side, and I have three beautiful children.
None of that would have been possible without IVF.
I got pregnant right away, just as the pandemic was starting, but ended up having a miscarriage.
My OB didnt call me back because of lockdown.
Luckily, we were in-connection with one of the biggest, top-rated clinics where I live.
So I thought, Great, lets do it.
It was an ectopic pregnancy, which can be super dangerous.
I had to take methotrexate to end it.
We did our first retrieval, had good results, made embryos, genetically tested themall those things.
Both failed, and that was it.
I said, I dont care how much it costs, were switching clinics.
I even have a video.
The new clinic was smaller, wonderful.
The quality of your embryos is not what you think.
So we had to do yet another egg retrieval.
We ended up with two great-quality embryos.
My doctor decided to repeat some of the tests our old clinic had done.
He discovered my fallopian tubes were blocked and recommended removing them.
It seemed like the opposite of what I should be doing to get pregnant.
But we trusted our doctor, did the surgery, did our fifth embryo transfer, and it worked.
My baby is due in two weeks.
I am out of the depths of sadness that I’ve been in for three and a half years.
I was only 26 when we got married, and we wanted to start a family immediately.
I wanted four or five kidsa whole troop following me around.
I did all the usual things at first: ovulation kits, charting my body temperature.
But nothing was working, and I was getting repeat urinary tract infections, and then kidney infections.
An internal ultrasound revealed I had a rare unicornuate uterus.
Basically, when I was in utero, my uterus didnt fully form.
Im missing my right fallopian tube and have low kidney function.
The only bad part is you have to follow insurance rules.
Since I was only 29, the insurance company insisted I do six IUIs before IVF.
The first three failed.
My doctor tried to appeal because of my unicornuate uterus, but no luck.
We decided to take a break from treatments.
We went to a bunch of our friends weddings and capped it off with two weeks in Italy.
After our break, I went back to the clinic.
We did our last three required IUIs, and all failed.
Well do IVF, I thought.
It will solve all our problems.
But I was in for a rude awakening.
After two years of failed embryo transfers, we switched clinics.
Finally, after my fourth egg retrieval and eighth transfer, I got pregnant with our son.
Parenting is so much easier than IVF.
Now were trying for a second kid.
Ive had two failed transfers in the last six months and am currently gearing up for my fifth retrieval.
This may sound strange, but going to the clinic is almost second nature to me at this point.
Im just so used to it.
At 37, I got pregnant naturally and had my second child.
At 39, I again got pregnant naturally and had my third child.
My extremely supportive husband, my immediate family, and a few close friends knew.
I needed that to function and have some balance.
I also did a lot of acupuncture to cope with the stress.
I didnt have to tell anyone when I had a doctors appointment.
When I ended up having to go to the doctor every day, I did it around lunchtime.
For retrievals and transfers, I usually just called in and said I was sick.
We drained all our savings.
One Christmas, my parents gave us part of an IVF round as a present.
Other family members pitched in.
You’re making emotional decisions, but you also have to be pragmatic because the costs are exorbitant.
Another big part of my story is how I dealt with the guilt.
For seven years I was asking myself, What did I do?
I also felt like I was letting down my husband.
I often thought, Is he going to leave me because I cant have kids?
I knew it was irrational, but thats how I felt.
We would become parents.
I would literally just be like, Yes, this is my baby.
I love this baby so much.
We pursued adoption at one point, and even did a round with donor eggs.
That failed, too.
But we remained hopeful.
Staying hopeful was our North Star.
There was a lot of comfort and peace in that.
I never really got answers about what was wrong.
In the end, I had a very thick medical file, stamped unexplained infertility.
But the story didnt end there.
My 14-year-old daughterthe one who was the IVF babyis now super passionate about access to IVF resources.
Its her story to tell, and shes comfortable telling the story of her creation.
She says lots of her friends are IVF babies, and its no big deal.
As I said, I’m a living miracle, and so is my daughter.
The second time, I made it to five weeks.
I saw the little embryo, but by week six, it started dying.
I bled heavily for four months.
They ended up having to give me the abortion pill because my body was just not letting go.
We tried to avoid IVF at first.
The money just seemed unattainable at the time.
We used our best embryo for the first transfer.
We had two more failed transfers after that.
I went into IVF thinking the science was going to be behind me.
I thought if I followed all the instructions and did all the shots, it had to happen.
Its a matter of statistics.
I wasnt prepared for the failing part.
You are not in control after all.
We have three embryos left.
My husband has been so supportive and understanding.
Just the other day we had this conversationjust thinking about it makes me cry.
But I told him I’d rather be with him and not have a kid than be without him.
My husband is worth more to me than having a child.
And you know what?
He said he felt the same way.
I had extreme pain and heavy bleeding, and it never went away.
I was 25 when I got married, but we didnt really start trying until I was 30.
We had bought the forever house.
We both had good jobs.
We were like, Okay, we’re ready for this.
On my first visit to a fertility clinic, I had an older female doctor.
She looked at me and said, Okay, how can I help you?
I just stared at her: How can you help me?
I want to have a baby and I cant.
But we actually ended up having a great rapport before she left the clinic.
We got six normal embryos from my first retrieval.
I got pregnant twice, but each time I lost the baby.
Luckily, I worked at a company that gave bereavement leave for losing a child.
I took it pretty hard.
I was so distraught and emotional I went to my original gynecologist and told him I wanted a hysterectomy.
Luckily, he talked me out of it.
I ended up switching clinics and donating our old remaining embryos to science.
I did a new egg retrieval, at age 39, and got four normal embryos.
Ive always said, Im a really good chicken, I just have a busted oven.
At that point we were ready to throw in the towel.
We decided to try one last transfer before surrogacy, and that worked.
On my 40thbirthday, I was able to tell my family I was pregnant.
Unfortunately, I was so nervous something was going to go wrong that I couldnt enjoy my pregnancy.
Infertility is a thief.
It caused me to pretty much be afraid to move for the first trimester.
Every single time I went to the bathroom Id examine the toilet paper for blood.
Im embarrassed to admit how much time I spent in bed, afraid.
Infertility also robs you of so much time.
You cant plan things or take vacations because your life just gets put on hold.
We were lucky to be in a financial position to do as much as we did.
And we have a wonderful little boy.
But were older parents.
My mother-in-law and father died recently, and that has robbed our son of knowing his grandparents.
As I said, infertility is a thief.
Its the main narrative of my IVF journey.
As I approached my 40th birthday, people started asking, So how are you feeling about turning 40?
But unexplained infertility is just so frustrating.
I just wanted to stay in bed and cry.
After that horrible time, I switched doctors.
Im really happy with my new doctor.
She is an optimist.
My old doctor never really expressed hope, but my new doctor does.
She specializes in recurrent miscarriages.
She found I have the marker for endometriosis and has started me on Lupron Depot.
For the first time in a long time, Im feeling hopeful again.
Our two remaining embryos were transferred to the new clinic.
You know, when I started IVF, time was a big thing.
Every month was so important in the beginning.
Now, Im not rushing; Id rather just get it right.
And Im okay with becoming a parent in my 40s.
I just hope I get the opportunity to do so.
A total roller-coaster story for each of them.
I started trying to get pregnant in 2013, with my ex-husband.
Thank goodness we didnt get pregnant, because he was not the right person for me.
I moved to Georgia and reconnected with my high school boyfriend.
We started trying to have a baby in 2018, before we got married in 2019.
But same thing: I wasnt getting pregnant.
The doctors discovered I had low ovarian reserve and a blocked tube.
So we started IVF.
We got one viable embryo from our first egg retrieval, but the transfer didnt work.
Then things got really painful after my second egg retrieval.
My husband rushed me to the hospital.
This was during COVID, so he couldnt come to the ER with me.
A CT scan revealed internal bleeding from the egg retrieval.
I had to have two blood transfusions because I had lost so much blood internally.
I was in the hospital, alone, for several days.
Fortunately, that retrieval was still successful.
We got three embryos, but only two made it through the five-day growing process.
Two months later, the clinic thought I was ready for another transfer.
In retrospect, I feel like I wasn’t fully healed.
At that point we had only one embryo left and I was terrified to do another retrieval.
It is what it is, and were just not going to be parents.
I was so used to failures that I didnt even tell my family we had done a third transfer.
But this time, it actually worked, and our son was born in August 2021.
After that, my doctor said we should go on birth control.
It took me forever to get pregnant, and here she thought I could get pregnant naturally.
You never know, she said, and she was right.
Six months after our son was born, I got pregnant.
It didnt stick, but I got pregnant and miscarried again, twice.
But just before the appointment, I got pregnant again, for a fourth time.
I didnt want to tell anyone, not even my doctor.
I even ordered my own HCG test from the lab.
My doctor cracked up when I told her.
This time I took progesterone pills, which can help support early pregnancies, and this pregnancy stuck.
At six months, though, my water broke.
Then things spiraled into an emergency situation.
Our daughter was born by C-section and spent 67 days in the NICU before she could come home.
Shes fine cognitively, just a little physically delayed, so shes getting help with her gross motor skills.
We often joke, She just needed her own dramatic story to top her brothers.
Looking back, I think one of the biggest issues with IVF is the isolation.
We just need to normalize the process, and support each other more.
I was 30 and had gone to the doctor because my husband and I weren’t getting pregnant.
But hey, I wanted to have kids.
Thats why Id gone to the doctor in the first place.
So I opted for a myomectomy, which would remove the fibroids but preserve my uterus.
My doctor said I should be able to get pregnant easily after my myomectomy.
But five years after the surgery, I still wasnt pregnant.
Then I started experiencing debilitating pelvic pain that impaired my ability to walk at times.
A reproductive endocrinologist said it was one of the worst cases of fibroids hed ever seen.
Recovery was brutal, and I ended up in the hospital for more than 20 days.
I kept going, but no luck, just more unsuccessful IVF cycles and more fibroids.
And you know, Im a woman of faith.
Im in your hands.
My body had already been through so much.
But my husband and I decided to do one more, and the fifth transfer worked.
I said to the doctor, Look, it took us 10 years to get to this pregnancy.
Theres no way Im terminating it now.
I believe in miracles.
The doctor said, Okay, lets buckle up our seatbelts and go along for the ride.
Well be right here with you.
In my head, I just kept saying, Healthy baby, healthy mommy.
Im going to walk out of here with my baby.
But my husband declared, This is not the time yet.
The babys not ready.
So sunrise after sunrise, we kept going.
Weve never seen anything like this before.
I told him, Listen, I dont expect you to know my God.
The doctors performed the C-section at 32 weeks.
But we all made it.
Our little girl weighed 2.5 pounds at birth, and was in the NICU for a month.
But the doctors said from the very beginning, shes a world changer.
Shes feisty and she knows what she wants.
My daughter, Nia, always says shes my co-CEO.
Now, in my work, I tell people to be proactive about their reproductive health early on.
I also remind them there are many paths to motherhood.
Its not the pregnancy youre going to be relishing, its the child.
*Names have been changed for privacy
Illustrations by Ibrahim Rayintakath
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