"We held our breath, waiting for the bad news. Week after week, we saw our baby growing."

''I’ve always wanted to be a mom. I was diagnosed with stage III endometriosis in May 2016. I was told that this could affect future fertility and I may require fertility treatments in the future. I started medications to keep my endometriosis suppressed, which put me into a medicated menopause and kept my pain under control.

My husband and I got married in November 2017. We decided that we wanted to start fertility treatments right away and decided to go straight to IVF, as it would give us the best chance of pregnancy in a shorter period of time, with the hope of keeping the endometriosis under control. We had our egg retrieval in December and ended up with 20 embryos. We felt so lucky and assumed we’d be holding our baby within the next year. Little did we realize, this was the start of a long journey.

In 2018, I had 2 surgeries, 2 canceled FET cycles, 1 chemical pregnancy, 1 ectopic pregnancy, and 1 failed transfer. We ended the year with no answers and no baby.

We were ready to regroup and start 2019 with a positive attitude and a new plan. After another FET that resulted in a chemical pregnancy, we did more testing and changed the treatment plan again. I was starting to feel hopeful with this new plan and after another FET, in May we finally made it to our first pregnancy ultrasound but then I started bleeding heavily at 6 weeks. But an ultrasound confirmed a strong heartbeat and a subchorionic hemorrhage. Two weeks later I miscarried and had an emergency D&C and needed months of treatment for anemia.

We decided to take a step away from treatment to focus on ourselves over the summer. I started acupuncture and to our surprise, we conceived naturally in August, but shortly after it was confirmed to be another chemical pregnancy. In December, we found out we were pregnant again. We held our breath, waiting for the bad news. Week after week, we saw our baby growing. I ended up spending a majority of this pregnancy quarantined at home due to COVID and in August 2020, I delivered our rainbow baby boy.

We love having Chloe’s paintings of our angel embabies in our son’s nursery. They mean so much to us, as those babies made us parents and these beautiful paintings tell a part of our story. We are now having our son’s ultrasound painted by Chloe and cannot wait to add it to his nursery.”

Since receiving this entry for the blog, Lauren has had her final addition to the nursery, in the form of little baby Archer's scan image!