Dear Baby

I have thought and thought about what I want­ed to say to you for months, but truth be told, I was too scared to write it down — as if writ­ing down your sto­ry would make it not real. It seems absolute­ly unfath­omable to me that in just a few weeks I will be hold­ing you in my arms, and not just see­ing you move across my abdomen like a trapped alien. You have been a spark in our dreams for so so so long, and despite the fact that you have been doing a head­stand on my blad­der for weeks, I still don’t quite believe that I am preg­nant at all.

Baby Girl, it’s impor­tant to me that you know your sto­ry. Every per­son walk­ing this beau­ti­ful earth is a mir­a­cle — but you, my dear, have shat­tered glass ceil­ings from the womb.

Baby, my body doesn’t gen­er­al­ly work the way we expect it to. Things that hap­pen auto­mat­i­cal­ly for most peo­ple — breath­ing, heart rate, diges­tion, and yes, repro­duc­tion, don’t hap­pen auto­mat­i­cal­ly for me. By the time you’re old enough to read this, I’m sure this will be obvi­ous to you, when we can’t share most foods and you’ve had to tag along to nine zil­lion appoint­ments with your Mama.

If I had a dol­lar for every time I was told it would be clin­i­cal­ly impos­si­ble for me to have a child, my bank account would look very dif­fer­ent. But Baby Girl, I always believed in you. Even when it seemed fool­ish — in fact, espe­cial­ly when it seemed fool­ish. I don’t take well to being told what MY body can and can­not do, I just had no idea what it would take to make it happen.

Baby Girl, you are a mir­a­cle over four years in the making.

I have been kicked out of three dif­fer­ent fer­til­i­ty clin­ics in Vir­ginia — some string­ing me along for 6–9 months before decid­ing that they wouldn’t accept me. I had end­less MRIs and blood tests and ultra­sounds and hor­mones. I was sent to peri­na­tol­o­gists, car­di­ol­o­gists, endocri­nol­o­gists and sev­er­al oth­er “olo­gists” for approval, only to be told it wasn’t enough. Some blamed my heart, oth­ers my stom­ach, oth­ers had tru­ly no ratio­nale at all, and just flat out said no. One group refused to see me for a con­sult in the first place. One doc­tor went so far as to say that my chances of get­ting preg­nant were about as like­ly as the Vir­gin Mary.

(To which I’d like to point out that the BVM did, in fact, have a child. Kind of an impor­tant one, too. Just saying.)

There are cer­tain­ly mul­ti­ple avenues to hav­ing a fam­i­ly, and your dad and I con­sid­ered every last one. We would have walked to the end of the earth and back, but on many lev­els that wasn’t enough. Pos­sess­ing not one, but two, genet­ic muta­tions with unknown ram­i­fi­ca­tions for life expectan­cy didn’t exact­ly sell me as Moth­er of the Year in the world of adop­tion and surrogacy.

I was run­ning out of options, and quickly.

I start­ed con­tact­ing larg­er uni­ver­si­ty hos­pi­tals in the area, in hopes that their size and research poten­tial would make me a more desir­able patient. Two turned me down from the very first phone call.

As a last ditch effort, I called Johns Hopkins.

When the admin­is­tra­tive assis­tant asked me to come in for a con­sult, it was my turn to refuse. My heart couldn’t han­dle anoth­er dis­ap­point­ment. I need­ed some­thing to grasp onto before I dragged myself down anoth­er like­ly dead-end. So I asked that before I come in for a con­sult, the doc­tors know that I had a pace­mak­er, gas­tro­pare­sis, exten­sive neu­ro­mus­cu­lar obsta­cles and a non-func­tion­ing auto­nom­ic ner­vous sys­tem. She took the mes­sage and I expect­ed, like always, to receive a “thanks but no thanks” a few days later.

By this point, I had learned that most fer­til­i­ty cen­ters are out­pa­tient cen­ters — mean­ing they aren’t attached to a hos­pi­tal, and typ­i­cal­ly func­tion as their own lit­tle com­mu­ni­ty. This is great for 99% of the pop­u­la­tion. Baby, I’m sure you’ll quick­ly learn that your moth­er doesn’t often fit into the main­stream. These cen­ters don’t so much have an EKG machine, let alone the abil­i­ty to han­dle a pace­mak­er. Most, I was told, don’t even have a pulse oxime­ter on hand. Pene­lope the Pace­mak­er and I were just too much to handle.

The next day, I got a return call — I didn’t even hold my breath or get ner­vous. I knew how this went.
Hop­kins also has an out­pa­tient fer­til­i­ty center.
Hop­kins Fer­til­i­ty is miles from the main hospital.

But Hop­kins Fer­til­i­ty shares that out­pa­tient cen­ter with the oph­thal­mol­o­gy clinic.

Yes, my dear. You’ve prob­a­bly already fig­ured it out.
There are FAR more patients with pace­mak­ers hav­ing their cataracts done, than there are try­ing to have babies.
THAT side of the out­pa­tient cen­ter had just about every car­diac machine known to man.

Most impor­tant­ly of all? They were will­ing to share.

Shout out to every last 80-year-old human with a pace­mak­er hav­ing their cataracts removed. I’d like to per­son­al­ly hug you, make you brown­ies, and invite you to a heart-healthy din­ner for exist­ing. The bright­est of gold stars, my friends.

Now this abil­i­ty to share equip­ment wasn’t a guar­an­tee — my case had to be brought before the entire depart­ment to review and approve. I had to inter­view with the mater­nal fetal med­i­cine team. I had to have let­ters of approval from my car­di­ol­o­gist and endocri­nol­o­gist. I had to be will­ing to live close to the hos­pi­tal if I got preg­nant. Above all, I had to under­stand that unlike The Hunger Games, the odds were most def­i­nite­ly NOT, in my favor.

I did. I knew the odds. But I had to try.

For near­ly two years, in a com­plete veil of secre­cy, I drove to Bal­ti­more 4–5 days a week. In 2017 I put 11,590 miles on my car, sole­ly for med­ical pur­pos­es. I gave myself end­less shots in my abdomen, took pills, wore patch­es, and bent over the sink with a gri­mace while your dad aimed giant nee­dles at the bulls­eye drawn by the nurs­es on my hind-end.

My genet­ic mate­r­i­al, along with your dad’s and your grand­par­ents’ was tak­en to make a pro­to­col to test our embryos. They didn’t have a test kit for my muta­tions, because no one else exists that has them. We had a 1:8 chance.

After two rounds of egg retrievals, months of hor­mones, genet­ic test­ing and what felt like a direct siphon­ing of our bank account, we came up with absolute­ly noth­ing. Not one genet­i­cal­ly clear embryo. Not. A. One.

I did three more rounds of egg retrievals, bat­tled blood clots and ovar­i­an hyper-stim­u­la­tion syn­drome, and retained 15 pounds of flu­id in my abdomen, which sound­ed like a fish bowl when I walked. We sent the embryos off, and we waited.

Through­out these entire four years, your father and I told next to no one about this process. The odds were so small and the stakes so very high. Many nights found me hud­dled in a dark cor­ner of a park­ing lot giv­ing myself shots between clients and pray­ing no one walked by the car at that moment. There were end­less com­ments about my weight gain from well-inten­tioned friends and fam­i­ly who assumed my 15 pounds of jig­gly fish bowl meant my stom­ach was healed and I was eat­ing more. In actu­al­i­ty, that couldn’t have been fur­ther from the truth.

For months, I opened every email with trep­i­da­tion and flinched when the phone rang. I found out after 2 months of wait­ing that the lab took a sum­mer break for a few weeks, and hadn’t even processed our embryos yet. I avoid­ed hos­pi­tal­iza­tion over the last round of egg retrievals by the slimmest of mar­gins, and my doc­tors were clear that my body may be wav­ing the white flag.

The stakes could not have been higher.

The odds were 1:8.
We sent FAR more than eight. Enough to have many, many genet­i­cal­ly clear embryos.
The call final­ly came in.

There was one.

That one, baby girl, was you.

After over four years, four fer­til­i­ty clin­ics, five rounds of anes­the­sia, hun­dreds of nee­dles, end­less com­pli­ca­tions, a brand new genet­ic test­ing pro­to­col, and a whole lot of hope, we had one. And if it didn’t take, we had none.

By all accounts and research, you are sta­tis­ti­cal­ly impossible.
But Baby Girl, you took the word impos­si­ble, and said I’M POSSIBLE.
You shat­tered glass ceil­ings far before you were 5 cells big.

I couldn’t be more proud.

Baby, I wish I could tell you that I will be able to guard your heart and your mind every day of your life. I want to say that you will want for noth­ing and nev­er feel a moment of self-doubt or sad­ness, but I know that’s not how this both bru­tal and beau­ti­ful life works. In fact, you will some­day learn that we NEED those moments to grow and learn and become the most authen­tic ver­sion of ourselves.

So Baby, I hope you will tuck this let­ter away some­where safe, and read it often. I hope that in those moments of lone­li­ness or wan­ing con­fi­dence, you will remem­ber just how hard you worked to be here.

It’s impor­tant to me that you know this sto­ry — YOUR sto­ry. Tomor­row I’ll be 37 weeks preg­nant, which means that you, my lit­tle mir­a­cle, are a full-term baby and I’m pret­ty sure my heart may just explode with won­der. Your dad and I wrote the pro­logue, but now the sto­ry is yours to write, and I can­not wait to read it.

Come what may, you are WANTED, you are LOVED, and I will ALWAYS believe in you.

All my love,
Your Mom