two years of infertility hell has taught me that the time to talk is now.

Hello and welcome! I am Megan and I am currently amid a two-year battle of (in)fertility. In 2022, my husband (Phil) and I lost our son, Henry, when I was 19 weeks pregnant. This miscarriage threw me into the hospital system for 9 months as doctors tried to remove “everything” and then fix my uterus that had become scarred because of the constant surgical trauma to it. Eventually, in April of 2023, after five surgeries, my surgeon at Mayo sat us down and told us I would NEVER be able to carry our children. Losing our son was the worst day of my life. Receiving this news was the second.

We weren’t ready to give up our dream of having [biological] children, and so we immediately went into IVF and on a crusade to find a gestational carrier.

In August 2023, we created five genetically normal embryos. Even better, we found a carrier that was just as excited to go on this journey with us, as we were with her!

In October 2023, we had our first embryo transfer, and our GC got pregnant! But it didn’t last. In December 2023, we had our second embryo transfer, and it didn’t stick. There are no words to describe the devastation and heartbreak of having three losses in less than a year and a half.

In January 2024, my husband and I decided to embark on IVF again, in hopes of creating more embryos. After all, I was 37, and I was hyper aware of my [diminishing] egg quality. Despite retrieving 26 eggs, only 14 made it to the embryo stage, and of these 14, only 2 were genetically normal.

After a massive change in medical protocol for our GC, including placing her into a medically induced menopause, we transferred one of our beautiful (both the Doctor’s and Embryologist’s words) embryos from IVF round #2 on March 14, 2024. The next 9 days were more excruciating than I can put into words. We were all holding our breath, knowing that either result was going to change all our lives forever. A positive test, and we would FINALLY be able to move forward, and start living out our dreams of pregnancy and parenthood. A negative, and we would have to start the surrogacy journey (finding a carrier, going through medical, FDA, psychological, legal, financial clearance) all over, and I would undergo IVF again.

On March 23, 2024, we received the news that we were FINALLY pregnant.

I don’t know how this story ends. We have been through so much trauma, pain, bad news…. it’s hard to believe that a baby may really be at the end of this. We certainly hope so. Regardless, this journey is one that has changed all our lives. Mine. My husband’s. Our GC’s. And all our families’ and friends’. Thus, I am hoping that in sharing, we can all shed a bit of light on the darkness of infertility, and perhaps provide a bit of hope for those who are living in it.