Our second grant that was going to be awarded at our Dinner & Hope Event goes to an inspirational couple that will be undergoing fertility treatments to try to grow their family.
Our grant will cover the cost of their cryopreservation tank rental, shipment, IVF Cycle, Retrieval cycle and monitoring, and frozen embryo transfer and monitoring.
The couple was able to conceive one child naturally. They were able to conceive again; however, they experienced a loss at 14 weeks. The couple had to put trying to conceive on hold when they received a cancer diagnosis. Thankfully, the cancer treatment has worked, and the couple is able to continue their journey to grow their family.
They have gone through two IUIS and recently experienced a chemical pregnancy. The couple has been advised that the best plan going forward is to do IVF with PGS testing to check the chromosomes of the embryos to see if they can get a viable embryo.
We are looking forward to following this couple on their journey and hopeful for their success. Please send your love, support, and prayers to the couple for their upcoming treatment.
A note from the couple about their infertility journey:
“We knew we wanted kids and began trying on our honeymoon, 3 months after our wedding. We conceived our son quickly, on our second cycle trying to conceive. We wanted at least one more (if we had a girl, we’d be done. If we had another boy we’d maybe try once more for a girl) and I wanted them fairly close in age.
We began trying to conceive #2 when our son turned 1, in October 2017. After 8 months trying to conceive, we were pregnant! At 10 weeks we did the blood test and found out we were having a girl and our family would be complete!
However, at 14 weeks, we lost our baby girl. We had already had an ultrasound at 7 weeks where we saw and heard her little heartbeat, and we heard her heartbeat a second time at my first prenatal at 11 weeks. We had announced on Facebook, we were buying things, we had completed the first trimester, we thought we were now in the “safe zone.” But, the truth is, bad things can happen at any time and we lost our baby girl on September 3rd, 2018.
One month later, my husband was diagnosed with cancer. I thought I was going to lose him too. It took almost the whole month of October to narrow in on what exactly he had and what treatment plan would be put in place. He was finally diagnosed with Primary Mediastinal Large B Cell Lymphoma, a luckily very treatable cancer. His treatment plan included 6 rounds of chemotherapy to be completed in the hospital for 5 full days each time, every 3 weeks.
He completed that in February 2019. But the cancer wasn’t gone, so they added radiation 5 days/week during August and September. This did the trick and on December 6, 2019, he was finally cleared and in remission! Knowing that the chemo could potentially ruin his fertility, we had sperm frozen before he began treatment. I’m glad we did because at his recent semen analysis 2/10/2020 it was determined he has zero sperm.
We began our IUI journey in December 2019 using the frozen sperm. Our first IUI failed. Our second IUI was successful, even though right before the procedure our doctor sat us down and said she wasn’t confident that the sperm could swim to the egg and penetrate it. She thought maybe the freezing and thawing process had affected the sperms motility and they didn’t seem to be swimming very well.
But we did it! We conceived in January 2020 from our second IUI! Sadly it didn’t take long to see that my HCG numbers were falling and this would end up being a chemical pregnancy. Our new fear is that the cancer could have caused DNA fragmentation in the sperm while the cancer itself was growing.
The early stages of this could have been responsible for our late miscarriage in 2018 and the more advanced stage at the time of freezing sperm could be the cause of the more immediate miscarriage this last month. Our best plan of action is to go through IVF with the frozen sperm and add on PGS testing to check the chromosomes of the embryos to see if we can get a viable embryo.”
