First Comes Marriage:
Brett and I wasted no time and immediately started planning our wedding. Our engagement ended up being a little over a year. Half way through Brett got a job offer in San Diego. So we packed our bags and off to a new city we went! When we first moved to San Diego we were blessed to be able to live with my parents for a short time. I was also lucky enough to find a job at a Private School for children with special needs, where I learned a lot about myself, others and made some of my best girlfriends here is SD! So now that we both had jobs and wedding planning was in full throttle we decided the next step would be to buy a home! Not but a mile from my parents, we found the perfect condo and ended up moving in that summer. We got the keys to our home in July and were set to be married on October 5th, 2013. That day quickly became the second best day of my life!
I am sure you can guess what comes next! We were now married, owned our first home, and it seemed the only question we got asked was “so when are you going to have kids?” In 2013 I was 25 and not quite ready for kids yet, nor was Brett. But knowing our journey to starting a family was going to be a bit different than others we thought we would start looking into our options. We consulted with my cardiologist who then recommended a high risk OB who helped us determine the best path for us. As I mentioned before, my heart condition is so rare there really isn’t enough data for the doctors to be able to say one way or another how my heart would handle pregnancy. As most of us know a woman’s body produces double the amount of blood as soon as she becomes pregnant. We have no way of knowing how my ventricle would handle that.
The biggest fear brett and I had would be the long term effect pregnancy would have on my heart. There was a good chance during the pregnancy I would be “ok” because I was young and healthy, but pregnancy could diminish my heart health and possibly cause me to have early heart failure, which i am already more prone to. So needless to say we had a lot to think about! About 2 years later (2015) we were hit with another hiccup when i had some chest pain that would later lead us to believe I had Pulmonary Embolism ( Blood Clot) that dissipated on it’s own. We decided then to schedule another appointment with the OB specialist for her to tell us what we had already assumed. Me now being on blood thinners and having a history of PE only added more risk to my already high risk during pregnancy.
This unfortunate event ended up being the deciding factor in using a surrogate to start our family. In the end we decided the whole point in starting a family was to be a family and for both of us to be here. There are just too many risks involved with me carrying so with that being said we made our first appointment with a Dr. Brooke Friedman in January of 2015, and kicked off what would be the start of this journey we’ve been on for the past 5 years!