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The story behind Partners to Parenthood — told through the eyes of someone who lived the journey, questioned the system, and built something better.
I picked up the phone half asleep. It must have been early in the morning; the room was still dark. My husband was calling from Germany.
He apologized for waking me up and said he had one piece of good news and one piece of bad news. Then he asked which one I wanted to hear first.
I chose the bad news first.
By then, I had learned how to handle bad news better than I knew how to react to good news.
But he said, "The good news is, you are a mom."
The phone nearly slipped from my hand. My heart skipped a beat. I went completely silent, trying to understand what he had just said. I was repeating his words to myself; "I am a mom" trying to have that sink in.
Year after year, I had wished to become a mother. Just when I expected to be a mom, I wasn't. It takes twelve to fourteen days after embryo transfer to hear if the transferred embryo(s) survived or not. That is a long wait if you have gone through a fertility cycle and are waiting for the big news.
My husband's words echoed in my mind, standing in sharp contrast to years of negative pregnancy tests, failed treatments, guarded expectations, and the rollercoaster of hope and despair that had defined our journey.
My mind drifted back to the journey we embarked six years ago - egg retrievals, embryo transfers, blood tests, and monitoring appointments. I injected myself several times a day. I traveled to the clinic through a snowstorm for a monitoring appointment, even when trains were not operating to the city.
Through each cycle, I gave so much blood for testing that it felt like the total amount could have saved another patient's life. But despite more procedures, the IVFs failed.
And I associated the failure with myself. It was not the process that had failed. It was me. I had failed to have a baby. I had failed to make a family.
When you are waiting and expecting, you want to trust your clinician and the process so much, you forget to question what might have been missed in the equation.
Having gone through multiple IVF cycles, only on the fifth cycle, I was prescribed Plaquenil. Even then, it was not clear that I had an autoimmune condition.
My doctor explained that I needed to take Plaquenil because my C-reactive protein was elevated and my body might be entering a kind of fight-or-flight state. When he saw my eyes widen in confusion, he explained it more simply: sometimes the immune system may respond to an embryo as if it were a foreign presence entering the body.
My mind immediately raced back to the four IVF cycles I had gone through in sixteen months. Had the previous clinics ever checked this marker? Had anyone looked at inflammation, immune response, or the possibility that my body was not simply "failing" to carry a pregnancy, but reacting?
For the first time, I wondered whether something important had been missed — not because I had failed, but because no one had looked at my body as a whole system.
Fight-or-flight mode is our built-in alarm system. Even without a visible physical threat, medical uncertainty, financial pressure, infertility treatment, trauma reminders, and feeling unsupported can all activate it.
My doctor explained that my body might be reacting to the embryo as something foreign. That was mind-breaking. The very thing I wanted most — the very thing I had been injecting myself for, waiting for, praying for — might be interpreted by my immune system as something to defend against.
Years later, I would learn that I have something called undifferentiated connective tissue disease. An ophthalmologist I saw for dry eyes, after my rheumatologist's recommendation, explained it in a sentence I never forgot:
"You are lupus, but you are not lupus."
That sentence stayed with me because it captured what so much of medicine struggles to hold: diagnosis codes are categories, but the body is not a category. The body is a system. My body functions as a whole, and it is different from anyone else's system.
At my very first OB-GYN visit, I was told I had polycystic ovarian syndrome. I had painful periods — bedrest-level painful — and later developed insulin resistance. But no one looked deeply at how insulin might affect the rest of my hormones, how my sex hormones might affect my fertility, or how every metabolic event in my body might be connected.
Then, during JPMorgan Healthcare Week in January 2026, when I started to build my business, I heard a neuroscientist in one of the sessions, referring to our ovaries — as another intelligence system in the body, just like our intestines. They were calling it a "second brain." I remember thinking: for women, maybe our ovaries are also a second brain.
Not because they think in words, but because they carry signals, timing, inflammation, metabolism, stress, hormones, and history.
That is why PtP cannot be only a scheduling tool, a benefits tool, or a clinic intake form. Reproductive care needs to see the whole person — the labs, the immune system, the hormones, the emotional load, the financial stress, the medical history, the missing records, and the pathway ahead.
Because sometimes the question is not simply, "Why did the cycle fail?" Sometimes the question is: "What did we never connect?"
When you are in an IVF cycle, you do whatever it takes. Especially in the first cycle, you almost immediately begin preparing yourself for the possibility that you will become a parent within the next few months. You count forward. You imagine dates. You adjust your life around a future that may or may not arrive.
IVF is often presented as the first "go-to" solution for people who consider parenthood later in life. But more than half of IVF cycles do not result in a live birth.
In 2022, according to the CDC, 435,426 ART cycles were performed across 457 reporting fertility clinics in the United States, involving 251,542 patients. Those cycles resulted in 94,039 live-birth deliveries and 98,289 live-born infants. But 184,423 cycles were egg or embryo banking cycles. When those banking-only cycles are removed, approximately 251,003 non-banking ART cycles remain — and even then, fewer than half resulted in a live-birth delivery.
That means many IVF cycles represent not only emotional loss, but also wasted healthcare expense, repeated procedures, lost time, and preventable suffering. So the question becomes: why and what can we do about it?
Is it because we do not assess patients deeply enough before moving them into IVF?
Is it because private fertility clinics are often disconnected from the broader healthcare system?
Is it because reproductive care is still treated as if only the ovaries, uterus, sperm, or embryos matter — rather than the whole person, their medical history, lifestyle, genetics, immune health, mental health, benefits, finances, and support system?
Is it because infertility is still taboo, so people often suffer quietly and seek help late?
Is it because reproductive health is not treated as an essential part of preventive care — something that should be checked earlier, not only after a crisis?
Is it because we assume fertility is "natural," and therefore do not think it needs to be measured, monitored, or supported until something goes wrong?
The critical issue is that reproductive health is often addressed too late. Then, we ask people to wait, try, search, pay out of pocket, and navigate fragmented systems before they receive a complete picture of their reproductive health. Patients may move into IVF without a full understanding of underlying medical, hormonal, genetic, metabolic, emotional, financial, or social factors that could shape their pathway.
This is why early intervention is critical.
Reproductive health should be part of preventive and whole-person care. It should not begin only when infertility is diagnosed, when age has become a limiting factor, or when IVF is the next available option. Earlier assessment, better education, and connected care can help individuals and couples understand their risks, choices, timelines, and alternatives sooner.
PtP is built around this belief: the path to parenthood should not begin with confusion, crisis, or fragmentation. It should begin with clarity.
When an IVF clinic discourages a woman over 42 from using her own eggs based on age, AMH, and FSH values, it may feel like rejection. It may feel like they are protecting their success rates — and sometimes they are.
But they may also be doing something important for you. The part that feels cruel is complicated.
Because your egg quality may never get you there. And if transfer is successful, the risk may only be beginning. As age rises, egg quality declines, and the risk of chromosomal abnormalities and complex pregnancy increases. That can lead to miscarriage, preterm birth, NICU stays, and serious risks for both mother and baby.
One hospital clinician, whose work focused on women over 40, once told me: "Look, I can get you pregnant. But what if you lose your baby in the third trimester instead of the third week?"
At the time, I was pregnant — only three weeks pregnant — and my blood pressure would not go below 150/80. My insulin resistance was also sitting quietly in the background, easy to miss unless someone was looking at the whole picture.
Both high blood pressure and insulin resistance can increase pregnancy risk. They can affect the mother. They can affect the baby. They can shape whether a pregnancy needs closer monitoring, earlier intervention, or a different care plan.
And still, in so much of reproductive care, these risks are not connected early enough.
We often focus on whether someone can get pregnant. But the deeper question is whether the whole health system has prepared that person to carry a pregnancy as safely as possible.
ART is often designed around conception, while the patient's health journey starts before ART and continues after ART — back to OB/GYN, maternal-fetal medicine, primary care, endocrinology, cardiology, mental health, insurance, and the family.
But the body does not live in separate departments. And neither should fertility care.
Years later, I met a researcher studying the relationship between insulin and heart disease. Insulin was about hormones, metabolism, inflammation, vascular health, pregnancy risk, and possibly reproductive outcomes. My immune system, endocrine system, cardiovascular system, and nervous system were all part of the same story.
Why is fertility care still organized as if the reproductive system can be treated separately from the rest of the body?
In assisted reproductive care, the path can look deceptively simple from the outside: consult, labs, stimulation, retrieval, embryo, transfer, pregnancy test. But for many patients, especially women over 35 or 40, the journey is not linear. It is layered.
A patient may come to an ART clinic from an OB/GYN or primary care physician. Then, if pregnancy happens, she moves back into OB care, maternal-fetal medicine, and primary care.
But too often, the system does not move with her.
The fertility clinic may focus on achieving pregnancy. The metabolic, immune, cardiovascular, emotional, and financial realities may sit in different records, different offices, and different conversations.
That is how continuity of care breaks.
And when continuity breaks, the risk is not only administrative. It can affect the mother. It can affect the baby. It can affect the choices people make, the timing of intervention, and the support they receive.
The body does not separate fertility from insulin, inflammation, blood pressure, stress, or age. The body carries all of it together.
Fertility care should, too.
Back on the phone, after another few minutes of silence, my husband spoke gently but transparently. "Now the hard news."
The baby was in the ICU. She could not breathe without support because her lungs were not fully developed. She was on a ventilator to help her receive oxygen. She was also being fed through a tube placed in her mouth.
He continued, "They are doing everything they can."
I actually took the news more calmly than he expected. I had given everything to bring this baby into this world. Now she was here. She was out in the world. I believed the rest would be a gradual improvement.
I looked out the window. The first hints of dawn were beginning to etch the sky. A new day was beginning, just as we were about to begin a new chapter — one filled with as much uncertainty as hope.
I could not wait to meet her, despite the distance from the east coast. Within a few hours I had to get on a plane to Krakow, Poland, then continue the long journey to Kyiv by train. There were no flights into Ukraine. No planes, not when a missile could bring one down.
Our gestational carrier said that our baby came one month early, unable to wait to meet us, her parents.
Our carrier had previously delivered for another couple. Then she carried our baby through the war. She brought our daughter into the world in a dramatic, swift delivery that no one had expected. Within minutes of rushing into the surgery room, our baby had made her entrance — miraculously freeing herself from the umbilical cord that had been wrapped around her neck.
That moment seemed to reveal who she already was: resilient, determined, and unwilling to give up.
My faith in my daughter's strength was profound. She had survived a war before she was even born. I believed that she and our carrier had carried each other through it with a shared spirit of survival.
The train ride was seventeen hours. There was a curfew. There was war. There was fear. And somewhere beyond all of that, there was our daughter.
I did not meet her the way intended parents are supposed to meet a gestational carrier. There was no carefully scheduled introductory call. No calm video meeting arranged by the clinic. No formal exchange of smiles, questions, and reassurance across a screen.
By the time I truly met her, war had already entered her home.
The clinic had recently called to tell us that she was pregnant. After years of treatments, failures, procedures, injections, waiting rooms, blood tests, and heartbreak, there it was: pregnancy.
But the clinic had not yet coordinated a call between us. I did not know her last name. I did not know her address. I did not know her phone number. Then the war started.
The clinic was overwhelmed with calls from intended parents all over the world. Everyone was desperate for information. Everyone wanted to know where their carriers were, whether they were safe, whether pregnancies were continuing, whether babies could still be born into a country under attack.
By the third day of the war, through continuous emails and calls, I found the information I needed. I found her full name. I found her phone number. I found her address. And then I called her.
It was early in the morning. I had learned that her house had been bombed during the night. Her television had exploded. There had been chaos, noise, broken glass. She had a wound on her leg, but other than that, she told me she was fine.
A pregnant woman carrying someone else's long-awaited baby saying she was fine with such strength... She was strong in a way I had rarely seen before. Not loud strength. Not dramatic strength. The kind of strength that keeps moving because stopping is not an option.
Her son was with her. He was twelve years old. I spoke with him too. His birthday was coming up, and when I asked him what he wished for, he said he wanted peace. Over the following week, we made a video for him. I lit candles, had a cake, sang a birthday song across distance - it was something human in the middle of everything.
Toward the end of 2021, the clinic matched us with her. We had waited six months for the right match. From the beginning, it was clear that her experience, steadiness, and emotional strength were exactly what we needed for this difficult journey.
That belief began early. Our carrier became pregnant on the first attempt. I had gone through the process nearly ten times without success. But with her, on the first try, there was life.
There are moments in life when resilience does not look like courage. It looks like doing the next impossible thing because there is no other choice.
For me, resilience often looked like needles, snowstorms, airports, hotel rooms, physical therapy appointments, and clinic visits I could not miss.
One winter in New Jersey, we had just bought our house in December. It was our first large home: four levels if you counted the attic and the basement, with three bedrooms and two and a half bathrooms. It was not newly built, but it was ours.
Then came the snowstorm. The electricity went down. For our area, it was out for four days. I soon discovered the hard truth: the generator did not work.
At the same time, I was in the middle of fertility treatment. I needed to do my injections. I needed rest. I needed to stay on schedule. The clinic appointments in New York could not simply be moved because my house had lost power. So I moved to a hotel.
I was exhausted and getting sick, but I still had to keep going. The next morning, I called the nearest Home Depot. A friend's husband drove me there. I bought one of the last two generators available.
Somehow, another miracle appeared: a plumber. He came to the hotel, picked me up with the generator, and took me back to the house. He shoveled and cleared a path all the way through the backyard. He removed the old generator and installed the new one.
I returned to my house with the flu, still making it to my fertility appointments in New York.
The year before, resilience had looked completely different. I was working at a client site in Doha while living in Dubai. Every week, I traveled internationally between the two. The hotels were pure luxury. But the days were punishing.
We worked at the client site from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., then at our office from 4 p.m. to 9 p.m., then continued in the hotel meeting room until past midnight. That routine repeated every day for five days before I flew internationally back to Dubai.
It was my first year of marriage. I was trying to meet my husband on weekends while also going through IVF cycles. I injected myself morning and night. Once, I vomited in a taxi. The heat, the stress, the daily rides, the lack of rest — none of it helped a body that was already being pushed beyond its limits.
Then came the fall. I slipped in the bathroom of the hotel, and that accident took three years of my walking life. Even then, I kept trying to become a mother.
The first time I tore my ACL, I was playing soccer for my university's women's team during a match against a university team from the Netherlands, hosted in Istanbul, Turkey. The opposing team's defender placed her leg between mine as I was running toward the goal as a forward. I fell hard, tearing both my meniscus and ACL.
The second time, I tore it stepping out of the shower in a bathroom in Doha, Qatar.
With a torn ACL, I flew to Toronto, emptied my locker, signed off on a property, visited a fertility clinic with my husband, where I froze my eggs, and then traveled across three states to meet my husband's family.
I remember a therapist who was helping me while I was living in Dubai on the weekends. At one point, she told me very directly: "You need to tell them to stop. You cannot keep traveling for work like this."
At the time, I heard it as advice about logistics — flights, exhaustion, work pressure, physical recovery. But years later, I would learn about STOP as one of the DBT distress-tolerance skills.
S — Stop. Do not react immediately. T — Take a step back. Pause, breathe, create distance. O — Observe. Notice what is happening in your body, mind, and environment. P — Proceed mindfully. Choose the next step instead of being pulled by pressure or fear.
Looking back, she was not only telling me to stop traveling. She was telling me to stop overriding my body. I had learned to push through pain, flights, deadlines, medical appointments, and life transitions as if endurance were the same thing as strength.
But sometimes the strongest thing is not to keep going. Sometimes the strongest thing is to pause long enough to hear what your body has been trying to say.
After one year of physiotherapy in Dubai, I continued with two more years of physiotherapy in New Jersey. And all this time, I kept trying. I kept injecting. I kept flying. I kept showing up at clinics. I kept hoping.
People often speak about infertility as if it is only medical. They ask how many cycles, how many embryos, how many transfers, how many medications. They do not always ask what happens to the rest of your life while you are trying to become a mother.
Infertility does not happen in a separate room from the rest of life. It enters everything. It enters your calendar, your body, your bank account, your marriage, your work, your sleep, your sense of time, and your belief in what is still possible.
That is why reproductive care cannot be treated as a narrow clinical event. It is the whole person walking into the clinic — with her history, her injuries, her inflammation, her hormones, her metabolism, her fear, her work life, her relationships, and her last remaining hope.
Resilience was not a personality trait I chose. It was what remained when every easier path disappeared.
My journey to motherhood did not begin with war. It began years earlier, quietly, medically, hopefully — in clinics, waiting rooms, blood test chairs, ultrasound rooms, and pharmacies.
In 2012, I froze eleven eggs in Toronto. At the time, I did not fully understand how long and difficult the road ahead would become. I only knew one thing with absolute clarity: I wanted to be a mother. Not someday in an abstract way. Not as a distant idea. I wanted to hold a child, raise a child, love a child, and build the family I had imagined for so many years.
Freezing my eggs felt like an act of hope. It was also one of the first times I began to understand how medicalized motherhood could become for women like me. Something that seemed so natural for others became, for me, a sequence of injections, monitoring appointments, blood tests, hormone levels, follicle counts, retrieval procedures, lab reports, and waiting.
There is a strange emotional language you learn inside fertility care. You learn numbers before you learn outcomes.
And then the hardest number of all: the pregnancy test result.
Each number carries a world inside it. A number can make you hopeful. A number can ruin your day. A number can make you believe again. A number can quietly break something in you.
Freezing eleven eggs in Toronto was supposed to give me a sense of security. It was supposed to preserve possibility. But fertility treatment never felt like security. It felt like bargaining with time.
I went through procedures in different countries and different cities. Toronto. Istanbul. New York. Canada again. Each place represented a new hope, a new doctor, a new protocol, a new possibility that maybe this time would be different.
I injected myself so many times that my body became both the battlefield and the vessel of hope. Morning injections. Night injections. Hormones. Bloodwork. Ultrasounds. Egg retrievals. Embryo transfers. Progesterone. Waiting. More waiting.
There were moments when I felt strong and determined. There were other moments when I felt reduced to a body that could not do what I wanted it to do most.
I wanted to be a mother so much that I kept accepting pain as part of the path. I accepted needles. I accepted procedures. I accepted disappointment. I accepted uncertainty. I accepted traveling alone. I accepted waiting rooms where everyone seemed to be holding their breath. I accepted the silence after failed transfers.
What I could not accept was the idea that I might never become a mother. That possibility lived somewhere inside me like a shadow I refused to name.
Every treatment cycle began with hope, even when I tried to protect myself from it. I would tell myself not to expect too much. I would remind myself of the statistics. I would prepare for bad news. But somewhere underneath all that caution, I still imagined the baby.
And when the cycle failed, I did not only grieve the medical result. I grieved the baby I had already imagined. That is the part many people do not understand about infertility. You can lose something that never fully existed outside your body. You can mourn a future no one else saw. You can grieve silently because the world does not always know what to call that kind of loss.
By the time I became a mother, I had already crossed so many invisible thresholds. I had moved from egg freezing to IVF, from IVF to donor pathways, from trying to carry to asking another woman to carry, from imagining a straightforward family to learning that family can arrive through extraordinary courage and sacrifice.
I wanted to be a mother. Not because it was expected of me. Not because society told me to. Not because I thought motherhood would make my life look complete from the outside. I wanted to be a mother because somewhere deep inside me, I carried that love before I ever had a child.
Because no one should have to navigate this journey alone. Because the questions "Why did this fail?" and "What did we never connect?" deserve answers. Because the body is a system, and care should treat it that way.