Let's start with our love story. It was about 10 years ago, at a McDonalds commercial shoot. The producer of the commercial introduced all of the girls I was on the shoot with and myself to Ricky James "pro dirt biker" :) He gave all of us his autograph and since that day I had a crush on him. About 3 years ago, 7 years later, I searched his name on instagram and found him. I liked a few of his pictures, and to my surprise, he liked mine back then gave me his number asking me to text him. After a couple days of texting, he asked if I wanted to go out on a date with him so I agreed and drove out to Oceanside from Huntington Beach. It went so well, still couldn't believe I was meeting him AGAIN! Fast forward 3 weeks, we moved in together! Super fast but it felt right. Just 6 months later he proposed, and 6 months after that we were married. And now we could not be happier.

Ricky and I have both always wanted a family. Now being married for a year and a half we really want to start trying to have children. But, as all of our friends and family know, Ricky was in a dirt bike accident when he was just 16 years old, resulting in spinal cord injury. He was still able to produce sperm after that accident, but when he was 20 years old, he broke his back a second time and it would only come out at unexpected moments, and very rarely. He has now been paralyzed from the waist down for 11 years, and that unfortunately prevents us from concieving naturally.

We were both worried for a while that we wouldn't be able to have children at all. With not having his sperm make its way out to create more, we didn't know if it was still swimming. And that was a scary thought for the both of us. We have recently been working with a doctor who specializes in male infertility, and he has helped a lot of parapalegics start their families, and feels very confident that he could help us.

So as I mentioned above, the problem for us was not knowing whether Ricky was fertile or not, so we were planning to have sperm extracted from a testicle to test it, which would have been about $3,000. Fortunately, he was stretching one day and retrieved a small amount that he rushed over to our doctors office to be tested. They said there were millions of sperm alive and swimming! We were SO excited to hear that. So we had that sperm sample froze, and hoped we could possibly do artificial insemination, way more afforable than IVF.  

We recieved a call from our doctor explaining a little more about that sperm sample. He said that while the counts were high (about 88 million, average is about 80 million), the motility of Ricky's sperm was only 2% (average being 40%). And after they thawed a bit of his sperm sample, only one was still swimming. This meaning, our only option for concieving a child would be In Vitro Fertilization, where they take the egg directly from me, and extract Ricky's sperm and inject it into the egg, and place it back into me. 

Money is defintiely a huge factor when it comes to raising a child, and while we could afford that, it is a big upfront payment that we have to make just to get pregnant. The cost could be anywhere from $15,500-$20,000+. So of course, any little bit would help and we would be SO appreciative.

We really are ready to be parents and we cannot wait to start a family together. We will do whatever it takes to make this happen and will be so grateful for anyone who can help us out along the way.

Thanks So much!!!