They prayed for one and were blessed with two, and every hard step on the road makes this ordinary, messy, beautiful life feel like a miracle twice over. They married in 2016 with one big hope: a baby. After five years together, it felt like the natural next step. She’d grown up in a noisy house with three siblings and dreamed of the same; months slipped by, then a whole year with nothing. Tests finally named the hurdle, PCOS. Clomid came next, two rounds, no luck. A fertility clinic in Texas ran every check they could and suggested IUI. Less invasive than IVF, still expensive, but they prayed, saved, and tried. The first attempt failed. They tried again. The second failed, too.
Their doctor gently advised one more IUI before moving to IVF. The problem was money. IVF felt out of reach, and the idea of taking a huge loan or going through foster-to-adopt, full of love but also risk, left them torn. Then the nurse called with a lifeline: an IVF clinical trial. It sounded like an answered prayer, until insurance changed its math and they needed $7,000 by day’s end to stay eligible. They grabbed a small loan, climbed that wall, and kept moving. More tests. A surprise minor procedure. Then injections, twice a day, to the minute. She hates needles, so her sister and nurse friends became her teammates.
They transferred one perfect embryo. She rested for two days and went back to her elementary classroom. She took a home test on blood-draw day to brace for the call. Negative. Hours crawled. Her patient portal finally showed a number: HCG 51. Not “less than one.” Technically pregnant, but low. She was told to come back after the weekend. That night, the bleeding started hard. She fainted; Derek called 911. With bills already stacked high, they refused the ambulance, bracing for a miscarriage and the kind of grief that doesn’t fit in words. Before her redraw, she took another test.
The line was dark, darker than any she’d seen. At the clinic, her numbers more than doubled. Relief rushed in, tangled with fear. An ultrasound showed nothing yet, not even a sac, so they warned it could be ectopic and asked her to return in a week. Seven long days later, there was a heartbeat, one steady, tiny thrum. At the eight-week scan, she went alone, expecting a quick look. The tech smiled and turned the screen: two babies.
The single embryo had split into identical twins. Joy arrived with new risks: mono-di twins sharing one sac but with a thin divider and separate fluid. The weeks that followed were a marathon of specialist visits in Houston and regular OB checkups, sometimes weekly, with two-hour ultrasounds to watch for twin-to-twin transfusion and heart issues. Scares came and went. Then, pink smoke at the reveal, two girls.
They held on through every appointment. The girls held on, too, waiting for their scheduled 36-week C-section. They arrived tiny, perfect, loud, and alive on New Year’s Eve. It felt like a year ending and a life beginning simultaneously. The route had been rough, with loans, needles, bad news, fainting, waiting rooms, and long drives, but there were two miracles where they’d once hoped for one.
The twins are busy, bright, and hilarious two-year-olds. She still shakes her head sometimes, thinking about the years of trying, the “no” that turned into a “maybe,” then into two “yeses.” She thanks God for a clinical trial that appeared out of nowhere, for numbers that rose when they could have fallen, for specialists who watched so closely, for a husband who kept showing up, and for a single embryo that decided to share.
