It's Official!

It's official! We received the official email from the agency saying we are matched!

After we met with the surrogate and her husband we immediately emailed the agency saying we want to move forward. That was Saturday. Today is Wednesday. Those days with no communication felt like years. You start to question "did something change?" Nope! Nothing changed, our contact was just out of the office.


"For this child we have prayed and God has granted us." Samuel 1:27

How Lucky Are We?

For all the unlucky events that had to take place, we still feel so lucky. 

October 2014 we had experienced a miscarriage. We went in for the 12 week ultra-sound and there was no heartbeat. It was devastating. It was recommended I have a D&C. What should have been a pretty routine procedure took hours and needed two doctors. Apparently my cervix is angled awkwardly. Awesome. To further complicate things, my body retained some of the tissue. Even more awesome. Because of how complicated the D&C was, the potential risk of hurting my cervix was too great, so it was recommended to just wait and pass it naturally.

It's really hard to mentally heal when your body hasn't physically healed. For 3 months I had to go for weekly blood work and every two weeks for ultra-sounds. There is nothing worse than having to go to the maternity ward for ultra-sounds, surrounded by excited pregnant woman, after a miscarriage. I had to go to 5 of them. Why this is so important is because when my body had finally healed physically in January, it took a couple months to mentally be ready to start trying again. But we got there and we tried and tried, with no success.  After months of trying, I started to wonder if maybe the complicated D&C had something to do with our failure to get pregnant. So we started to work with a fertility clinic. After more blood work, more ultrasounds and a HSG test, the clinic said everything looks normal, just keep trying and if you want some help give us a call. That good news came on a Friday...exactly one week before my breast cancer diagnosis.

My favorite picture of us as a family of four. I was 11 weeks pregnant.

When I received my cancer diagnosis, one of my first questions was "What does this mean for me and pregnancy?" Doctors had a hard time answering that. Sometimes chemo puts you into early menopause, my cancer just happened to be Estrogen and Progesterone positive, so being pregnant would feed the cancer (so thank God I wasn't pregnant at the time).  My oncologist at St. Francis Hospital did not support my request to freeze embryos. Because I was Stage 3 they wanted me to start chemo immediately. Thankfully I was able to get a second opinion at Mass General Hospital, with one of the top surgeons in the country. She along with my medical oncologist said, "We see this all the time, go do what you need to do and call us when you're done." I cried. I was so happy. There was a glimmer of hope that we could still have another baby...one day.

So again why was the unlucky miscarriage so lucky? Because we had already been working with a fertility clinic, I had a fertility doctor, I had a file. My cycle was timed perfectly with my diagnosis. I called the clinic, told them plans have changed...I have cancer and we need to freeze embryos. I was able to start injections that day. It was amazing. After two weeks of injections, lots more blood work and an egg retrieval, we successfully froze three embryos. Three chances to grow our family. How lucky are we?

When we were going through the pain of the miscarriage one of the hardest things to hear was "these things happen for a reason." When you are a mourning mother it is the last thing you want to hear. At the time I didn't want there to be a reason for my loss, I just wanted my baby back. But now I can see the loss of our baby brought us to where we are now. And this is supposed to be our story. This new baby that we are about to celebrate is meant to be here and change the world.

Our First Meeting

Still asking myself if yesterday really happened.

We braved the first major snow storm of the year to meet the surrogate and her husband for the first time. What would normally take 30-40 minutes took us an hour and a half. Highways were shutdown, there were spin outs and accidents everywhere, but that didn't stop us. We drove white knuckle at 24 mph and eventually got there.

Picture posted by the State Police of the highway situation

We had already read her profile that was provided by the surrogacy agency, she read ours. We had talked on the phone about a week and a half ago and meeting her and her husband in person just solidified what  we already knew, she was the one. We are still pinching ourselves that we found someone so perfect, so quickly. There is no doubt in my mind that she will love and take care of our baby for the next nine months, the same way I would have, if I could. And no doubt that through it all, she will have the love and support of her husband, which was just as important to us as finding the right carrier.

At a time when there is so much negativity in the world that you are constantly having to censor what you read and listen to because quite frankly it's all too much, it's reassuring to know that there are still good...still really good people in this world.

So this is it. It's really happening. We are having a baby! AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!! 

This is me

Hi! I'm Meghan and this is my first blog post. I plan to use this space to document my family's journey to become a family of four through surrogacy. I'm hoping my daughter and our future child will be able to look back on how hard we fought for this family. I'm hoping that maybe through sharing our story I can help others that are thinking about surrogacy.

I am 36 (God that sounds old) I am a wife. I am lucky that my husband does the cooking, washes dishes, starts my car on cold mornings and loves on me and our daughter.

I am a mom. Our daughter just turned 3 in November. She is spunky, funny and brilliant.

We live in New England, in a typical suburban neighborhood. Both my husband and I work in insurance and lead relatively normal lives. I love spending time with family and friends. I love playing and watching sports and being active. I hate running, but find it to be what I turn to when I need to unwind.  I have run 5ks, 10ks, and a half marathon. I love maxi dresses and Kendra Scott jewelry. I'm more of a Spring and Fall girl, but love the beach and hope to call the Shoreline my home one day.

Taken February 28. Just weeks after my diagnosis and in the middle of IVF.

If you had asked me a year ago if this was ever going to be the path my life would take I would have said you're crazy. But as life does we got thrown a curve ball in February 2016.

It was Tuesday February 9, I had finally scheduled an appointment with my OB/GYN to have the lump on my breast looked at. It was something I found and had been monitoring,  but truthfully thought nothing of it. I'm 36, healthy and no family history. It couldn't possibly be cancer. But after my doctor gave it a feel, she sent me immediately for a mammogram and ultra-sound. Thinking I wouldn't get results that day, I told my husband to stay home and that I would just drive over to the Radiology building by myself. I didn't have to be a doctor to see the enlarged lymph nodes on the screen and know I was about to get some pretty bad news. The tech told me to sit still and that she would see if she could get a doctor to look at my images. The phone rang in the room and I knew it was the doctor and as expected the news wasn't good. He said a bunch of technical stuff, rambled off some building at St. Francis Hospital that I needed to go to and a name of a doctor I needed to see. I didn't remember any of it. After the phone hung up I just sat there in my johnny not moving. Before I left I stopped at the receptionist's desk to get all the information again and this time asked if they could write it down, got in the car and called my husband. "We need to go to St. Francis Hospital immediately."

Once we were there, we scheduled a biopsy for Thursday for both the breast and lymph nodes and by Friday evening my phone was ringing confirming it was cancer. In less than 72 hours my life had completely changed. At the time we had been trying to expand our family.  As much as I should have been focusing on my cancer diagnosis all I could think about was "what does this mean for our family?" This can't be happening. We are meant to have another child. Our daughter is meant to have a sibling. Then I remembered Giuliana Rancic's story and knew what I needed to do. I needed to freeze embryos.

Dramatic. I know.