She didn’t get the story she imagined, but she found her voice, her people, and a new way forward, and that, too, is a family beginning. She was fourteen when her body started to change in a way that didn’t make sense. Her belly was hard and round even after losing weight, and it still stuck out when she lay flat. A CT scan answered what no one wanted to say out loud: a massive growth was covering her organs. That night, she was sent to a children’s hospital. Surgeons removed a twenty-pound tumor attached to her right ovary and fallopian tube. A week later, the call came, inside the mass was Stage 3 ovarian cancer.
There were more surgeries to check if it had spread, more weeks in the hospital, and then the choice she had dreaded. Chemotherapy. She lost her hair in days. Freshman year became whispers in hallways and hands reaching to tug at her wig. What got her through was a fierce family and a best friend who refused to let go. Life slowly rebuilt itself. In junior year, she met Cory, who looked at her like she was whole and beautiful. Years later, he planned a quiet proposal by the water, and she said yes with shaking hands and laughter. Then the past knocked again. A cyst appeared on her remaining ovary. Half had to be removed, and the lab would decide the rest. While her mother broke down in the waiting room, Cory said, I’m here now. The biopsy came back clear, but her doctor warned that time was not on their side if they wanted children.
They started with two rounds of IUI to satisfy insurance, but both were negative. They replanned their honeymoon to avoid Zika so they could move to IVF. The first retrieval yielded one egg. It became one embryo. They watched the transfer on a screen and whispered, This is our baby. Two weeks later, the bleeding started. The embryo hadn’t stuck. She cried in their bedroom while Cory cried downstairs. They tried again. No embryo. They tried a third time with double the medication, six eggs, one embryo, another careful transfer, another two-week wait during the first months of Covid. Negative. Three more cycles brought no embryos at all. Then came the call that their six covered cycles were used up. Anything more would be out of pocket and out of reach. They sat with the grief of an ending they didn’t choose.
To keep from breaking, she made a place to speak. She started an Instagram page called IVF.SUCKS and turned pain into dark, honest humor. In comments and messages she found hundreds of people who understood the early-morning drives, the needles, the hopeful calendars, the sharp emptiness of a single pink line. She learned that one in eight faces infertility and that silence makes the load heavier. The page became her way to say, you are not alone, and to hear the same back. A year after their last failed cycle, she and Cory began to talk about adoption. It wasn’t the first dream, but it was still a way to build the family they wanted.
She’s also thinking about turning her community into something bigger, maybe a small shop with designs that speak the truth with love, maybe more writing, definitely more support for the next person walking into a clinic with shaking hands. She didn’t ask for cancer at fourteen or a lifetime of medical rooms, but she learned how to meet fear with action and how to keep choosing hope. She has a partner who shows up, a mother who never wavered, a doctor who fought for her, and a circle of strangers who now feel like friends.
