Everyday you hear of a classic "boy meets girl" story.  They meet, fall in love and live happily ever after together.  

This is not that story. 

I fell in love with Drew in September of 2015 and some days it feels like it was just yesterday.  He was so sweet and his laughter so infectious that it could light up an entire room.  When he looked at you with that smile of his, you felt like you were the only person in the room.  

After a brief period we started planning our lives together.  Marriage, kids and a house somewhere in the suburbs with a white picket fence.  What we didn't know was just how fast cancer would could knocking on our door.  

I think the part I struggled most with was the fact that it wasn’t anything he did.  He wasn’t a smoker who had smoked two packs a day for several years.  

He simply had another rare form of brain cancer that started while he was within the womb and the medical treatment they did to save his life then was what caused this ticking time bomb so many years later.  

“Brief" doesn’t adequately convey just how tragic this story is.  Simply put, it was three and a half weeks from the day we brought him in thinking he had something minor wrong to the day he slipped from this life into death between one heartbeat and the next.

I was devastated.  We had been talking about getting engaged (and as I found out later, he had been ring shopping only a couple months before) and our future together.  We were supposed to have ages and ages to love, quarrel, laugh and cry together.  

Instead of planning our wedding, I had to plan his funeral.  

Only a very, very select few people knew at that time that Drew and I made a choice to take a chance at having a miracle.

 

He left me one final, amazing gift.

 

A genetic gift in the form of vials of sperm to use for IVF (Invitro Fertilization) down the road so that one day I could maybe bear his biological child.

 

If you've ever heard of IVF, usually its in connection with how expensive it is. In June of 2021 I obtained insurance that took some of the financial burden off but my fight was just starting.

 

Every clinic within a 75 mile radius turned my case down flat because post humous children (children born after death) are a legal gray area and they didn't want to entangle themselves in it.

 

I finally got in contact with Mayo Clinic and they agreed to look at my case after I retained a lawyer outside of their clinic.

 

Several months of work later, hours of phone calls and research, three sets of lawyers, an ethics committee and the Board of Directors for Reproductive Endocrinology later they agreed to fully take on my case and I could start.

 

I fully started the IVF process in February of 2022 and the medication costs are ridiculous.  I spent those four long years saving up to afford this and now I'm facing the facts of I might have to cancel my treatments.  

 

Despite having insurance, they won't cover 4/5 of my medications and I'm struggling. This took longer than we thought for my body to respond to the medications properly and having to buy vial after vial of insanely expensive medication is tanking me financially and emotionally.

 

I'm so close to finishing this out and maybe someday being able to bear his biological child. To have a piece of him back on this Earth with the family that loved and lost him would mean the world to so many people.

 

Someday I hope to tell our child of not only the struggles that Mommy went through to have them, but the glorious people that helped us in our greatest hour of need.  

Thank you, everyone.