Last fall, Fertility Solutions was a Journey to Parenthood sponsor during the Falmouth Road Race.
Our sponsorship funds contribute to “scholarships” for couples and individuals seeking financial support for the infertility treatment and/or third-party reproductive services needed to build their families. This year, three winners shared their stories.
Below, you’ll find an excerpt from Journey to Parenthood winner #1’s essay:
“My husband and I got a later start in life and now at 41, I realize that I don’t have time on my side and that very thought, to us, is devastating. I’m healthy, active, intelligent, but unfortunately I have unexplained fertility issues and after 20 months of working with a Reproductive Health Specialist and trying, we need help. In the end of August, my husband and I got some additional news on our journey. Up until that point, the plan was to use my eggs and something took a tum for the worse – we would need to use an egg donor. Our first question was, will I be able to carry a pregnancy and the answer was absolutely as I have a very healthy uterus. Our conversation on the way home was, we’re still in this and we can still have a baby. Or next conversation was how are we going to afford it?…
… We started to research our options and found your grant (Journey to Parenthood) and realized that if chosen, we could make our dream a reality. That brings us to the difficult task of answering the question of why pick us over someone who is also trying? How do you put those dreams, desires and feeling into words? How do we tell you that we would be incredible parents, and without this grant we may never get to experience parenthood and that at 41, our journey might very well end. It’s a very tough pill to swallow….
… We started trying to have children a few months after we got married. It wasn’t the next step or what we needed to do to make us complete, we just couldn’t wait to be parents. We had known each other for four years and were truly over-joyed and excited to be parents, though we most certainly put the cart before the horse. Neil had already picked out which bedroom would be the baby’s, we discussed names and parenting styles. We were so excited and couldn’t have imagined what would lie ahead.
We went to see an RHS who delivered the devastating and crushing news. I had unexplained infertility! Our world came down around us, I was in tears. Bless my husband for being that rock to console me. We had so many questions and so few answers and our research began. As the months went on and I took drug upon drug and procedure upon procedure. I became more and more amazed by and thankful for Neil. Never once did he judge, he always told me not to blame myself and always seemed to know what to say and do….
…. We have such a wonderful support system in or families who are eager to see us welcome a child into our family. We remember family vacations as kids, playing, getting in trouble and we want to be able to create those memories for our child. To cuddle our child when there’s a thunderstorm or to answer the same silly questions we asked as a child that weren’t so silly at the time. We want someone to love, nurture and watch grow up. To be a part of that and to be a family would be not only a miracle, but we would be honored to be parents and a family; which to us is priceless.
Thank you for listening to our story and giving us the opportunity to have a family.”
Fertility Solutions would like to send our congratulations and best wishes to the first Journey to Parenthood scholarship winner. We hope you’ll check in with our blog in the future to read excerpts from the essays of the second and third scholarship winners.