Racheal & Roberto

Racheal & Roberto's Story:

Over 20 years...

We met 21 years ago in May of 1999 when Rob was a young Marine and I had just finished high school was about to go to college. We fell in love very fast and got married in October of 2000. By then we’d already lost two babies.

I really wanted a baby and since I was so young at only 19 years old, I figured it would be easy. It wasn’t. Every time I got pregnant, I had a miscarriage. Every time I asked a doctor about getting pregnant, I was dismissed because I was young and “have plenty of time”. This lasted until I was 26 years old.

We were stationed at a Marine Corps base in North Carolina where I met a doctor who cared. He looked over my records and was determined to get me a baby. I did my first medicated cycle and low and behold, I got pregnant. Then miscarried.... Again. It happened a few more times.

He ran every test in the book and I was diagnosed with several things including PCOS and hypothyroidism, but the big thing was Antithrombin III deficiency. That means that I needed to be put on blood thinners.

My second cycle on blood thinners, we were successful. We were pregnant with our beautiful baby girl. Unfortunately the dosage wasn’t high enough and we had a second trimester loss due to blood clots in her umbilical cord.

Then Rob started deploying a lot and we moved to different duty stations, and in between deployments I would get pregnant and miscarry.

Fast forward to 2019.

I discovered CNY. Rob had just retired from the military and we had plans to just travel the world just the two of us but my heart needed to try IVF in order to say I’ve done everything possible and then close that door. CNY afforded us that ability without potential wasting all of our travel money.

So, we went for it.

We spent our 19th anniversary in New York at CNY getting our first embryo implanted before taking a vacation in Canada... It didn’t take. It was a chemical pregnancy.

Next cycle, we implanted two more embryos with a FET cycle. Rob didn’t want to do it, but he supported me asking for just one last chance.

I’m not going to lie. I tested every single day after implantation! Even when Rob tried to hide the tests from me, I found a way!

I was shocked when I got a positive three days later. They kept getting darker and I was so happy but nervous. Then beta day came. I had bad experiences with betas and I prayed that my number came back at at least 100 like my only other semi success.

It came back at 94 and I was ecstatic! Then my husband read the results and informed me that it was 940! What?!? That couldn’t be right.

Then the numbers more than doubled... TWICE!

We did an ultrasound and found out we were having TWINS!
I was so nervous and stressed out my whole pregnancy. Things always went wrong. I was terrified. But the further I went, the more I tried to relax.

Then things took a turn for the worst. My water broke at exactly 23 weeks. I gave birth to two very beautiful little boys. Unfortunately, two weeks later, one passed away.

My survivor is still in the NICU and is currently 33 weeks gestation but 2 months actual. I consider this a complete success story. Yes, we miss our little angel daily, especially since it’s still fresh, but we are so eternally grateful that we were blessed to see his face. We thought that it would never happen but it did. We thought that we would never get to hold our child but we did.

Our son is still in the hospital and I really want him to have a sibling. I’m definitely going to try to convince Rob to do another round with CNY, and I already have a gestational carrier lined up.

Thank you CNY and Dr. Kiltz (who did my FET) for our sons. We are ever so grateful.

Being a person of color effected me...

I believe being a person of color effected my care in a lot of ways. Especially when I was younger. The doctors sometimes actually said to me that even being married, it would look tacky for a teenaged black girl to have a baby. I would look like another statistic. I didn’t understand. I was married and working. Yes, we were young people of color, but we were also a family. That was actually one reason a fellow black lady doctor turned me away. It hurt.

Helpful resources Racheal & Roberto found:

Prayer. I never lost faith that I would be a mom. I joined a lot of groups on social media and I share my experience with women who are going through every single emotion I went through from jealousy and anger to anxiety and fear. It’s extremely difficult being in a marriage when you’re suffering from infertility and every other family member on both sides seem to be having babies every year.

All I could do was pray on it. I also started a YouTube channel about my journey. If you’re in the CNY fertility group on Facebook, ask in there and I’ll post a link.

Unique Moments:

My story isn’t unique except for the fact that because of military life and Rob’s job in particular, we had a few gaps in between our treatments which caused our 20 year wait. We couldn’t even adopt because he wasn’t available to take the courses. It was hard being an aunt and a godmother when I wanted to be a mommy too.

Hope, Inspiration and Advice:

Please advocate for yourself. Even if you’re 18 years old and want a baby, remember that you’re an adult and remind your doctors of that fact. I really wish that I didn’t let them intimidate me out of precious years of trying. I’m 39 years old with my first baby and while I’m grateful, I’m also still angry with the attitudes of some doctors. Especially the ones who didn’t want to make our race look worse by helping me when I was so young.