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I never thought my road to a living child would take two years when we began.  

We began to try to conceive in September 2014, and 6 months later we hadn’t conceived. In fact I never once had any confirmation of ovulation.  We saw a reproductive endocrinologist who diagnosed me with PCOS.  I was given femara to induce ovulation and on the second cycle I was able to get pregnant. However, the pregnancy ended in a termination due to a triploidy diagnosis.  

We went to back our RE who recommended starting up again on femara and on the second cycle I was able to pregnant again, the pregnancy ended in a loss around 6 weeks.  We did further genetic testing of my husband and me. It turned out he has a pericentric inversion of chromosome 9.  It was not a known issues of pregnancy loss or triploidy but we couldn’t be sure. At this point with the ages of my husband and I and the two losses my RE recommended IVF with PGD to screen the embryos for any genetic issues.  Our first IVF cycle resulted in a failure, none of the eggs retrieved ( 6) made it to 5 days needed to biopsy the embryos for PGD and freezing.  We decided to do a second IVF cycles and some different drugs to stimulate egg production, we got more eggs this time ( 11) but the day after fertilization the embryos stopped growing, and once again we had nothing to send off to PGD.  At this point I felt pretty hopeless.  

I felt like I would never have a living child.  

My husband and I began researching other IVF clinics, even though we loved our RE.  Our RE began to propose looking into donor eggs.  While giving up some time to go over my options my RE wanted to try an IUI cycle and perhaps my body would handle getting pregnant better internally than with IVF.  We called it a Hail Mary IUI; we figured why not try and did stimulation with menopur.  The IUI actually worked. I was pregnant! And in fact at 7 weeks we discovered I was pregnant with twins!  We did lose twin A at 16 weeks when I went into labor.  But Baby B survived.  She was born at 29 weeks, due to preeclampsya. Being so premature, I was fearful my daughter would meet the same fate as my other babies.  After a 2 month NICU stay she came home two days before Christmas.

She really is our miracle, and we are so grateful to have this perfect almost four year old in our lives.  

~Kerri Lynn Shea