My journey with IVF

Mother’s Day is coming up. I know how heavy that can feel.

I was on a plane coming home from Detroit on Tuesday night when this woman seated in the row in front of me tapped me on the shoulder. She told me that my content around my personal fertility journey was super helpful and inspiring to her. I was really touched. I asked if she was going through something similar, and she said yes.

It made me realize I haven’t talked much about my fertility journey in a while. And with Mother’s Day coming up, I wanted to pause and acknowledge just how hard, messy, and emotional the road to starting a family can be.

This time of year can be especially tough for those who are hoping to become moms but aren’t there yet. So before I get into my story, I just want to say: I see you, I hear you, and I’ve been where you are. I know May 11th might feel heavy but know that you’re not alone.

We’re also living through a particularly fraught time in this country when it comes to reproductive rights where even pregnancy loss can carry legal consequences. It’s scary. So I wanted to rewind a bit and talk about how I ended up doing IVF.

About six months after Brendan and I got married, we started trying to have a baby. And after seven months of no luck, I decided to see a specialist just to check everything out. My OB-GYN referred me to an amazing doctor, Dr. Hey Joo Kang at Weill Cornell. We did all the tests and everything came back looking pretty normal so I was concerned but not super concerned.

Her first recommendation was to try Clomiphene, a medication that helps with ovulation. I did that for three months and in the third round, I got pregnant. This was 2019 and we were so excited. It was Christmas and my in-laws were staying with us in the Hamptons. Brendan and I were bursting to tell but decided to keep it to ourselves since it was still so early.

And honestly, I’m glad we did, because I ended up miscarrying. It was heartbreaking. I wasn’t prepared at all and I didn’t even fully understand how common it is.

We actually shared more about that part of the journey on YouTube, but what came after was probably the hardest part. Emotionally, I didn’t bounce back quickly. I became laser-focused and basically obsessed with getting pregnant again as fast as possible. And I know that’s a common reaction but man, that monthly rollercoaster of hope then disappointment was brutal.

I went months without drinking, without caffeine, without saunas, without certain workouts. I went through the list that was my life and slashed so much of it. I became type A and sort of lost the plot. I did several more rounds of Clomiphene and then moved on to IUIs aka the “turkey baster” method. We did three and none of them worked.

By that September, Dr. Kang told me that IVF was the next step. I was devastated and couldn’t wrap my head around it. I thought of myself as the picture of health and wellness. I mean, I had cultivated an entire career out of it. I just couldn’t understand why this wasn’t working and what I was doing wrong.

I came home from that appointment and told Brendan. Without missing a beat, he said we should do it. If this is the next step, then this is the next step. No egos. It’s our story and we needed to embrace it.

He reminded me that while I felt like I’d lost control, IVF could actually give us a sense of structure and more data to go off of. Yes, there are drugs and shots and schedules, but there’s also a plan. My brain operates best when I have a firm plan in place and I decided to think of that as the silver lining. Once I accepted that this was going to be part of our story, I felt this huge emotional release. It was the strangest feeling; understanding that I had no control made me feel strangely better.

We started IVF, and thankfully, it worked well for us. We only had to do one round and we got several embryos. Both Preston and Claude came from embryos created during that same cycle. Technically, they’re fraternal twins since they were fertilized at the same time and if I had transferred them together, they would’ve been born as twins.

With Preston, the first implantation didn’t stick, but the second one did. And with Claude, I had a miscarriage after the first implantation, and she came from the second.

I really don’t want to contribute to any sort of comparison game — that’s something I found so frustrating in my own journey with fertility, the comparisons. What matters is that we found our path. And you will, too.