In 1999 I was a sophomore college, and I was diagnosed with graves disease.

It was kind of in passing.

Hey, you might have some issues with the fertility.

As a college student, it's not something that you really pay attention to.

I met my husband, Chris, in college.

We worked that out back.

I worked in a restaurant industry tryingto make ends meet and get us through college.

We were married june 5th, 2004.

I think it was about a year into us being married.

Hey was diagnosed with a brain tumor and kind of our whole world stopped When I walked into the room and I saw my husband on and I see you, he looked up and he reached for my hand.

I knew that he was okay.

But at that moment I knew that life was really short.

And as a young couple, you never know what tomorrow is gonna bring.

And I didn't know that tomorrow we wanted Children.

And so that kind of put us on the faster path to want to try to conceive.

And so we did what anybody else any any other couple would do.

We, you know, brought in some of our slow jam CD's brought in some line and, you know, stop the birth control and we waited and we waited, waited and we waited and we tried.

And then it really started to just not become enjoyable anymore.

And it was all about when I'm opulent ing again.

It was tracking my menstrual cycles.

It was crying because my trash can was filling up with nothing but a population kits in pregnancy tests that were negative.

We're spending in ungodly amount of money on just ovulation kits.

Then there were the pregnancy tests.

After you are ovulating, we were trying to conceive naturally.

For about a year, most O B.

G wagons will tell you.

Hey, you need Thio.

You need a leash.

Try unprotected sex for at least one year.

I schedule that appointment start.

Start seeking for help.

I went to the Giants and we've been trying to conceive for a year.

We've had absolutely no success.

I think we did about two or three rounds of climate right out the gate and then after that that wasn't responding to it.

And then she started with an I U I Protocol, which is intruder insemination.

It is basically, they take the male sperm, they separate the semen from the actual sperm, and then they injected into the woman's uterus.

Pass the cervix into exactly where it needs to go When you start in II treatment.

That two week wait would start starting from the time that you've had your procedure to win, you can actually test.

You might.

You might have a viable pregnancy.

If you see your two week wait on the 18th that's when you test.

Then it works.

Then you go back for blood work.

That time is so incredibly hard because it's a roller coaster of hope and disappointment.

So we did that and it failed.

We did it again, and it failed.

Did it?

Another time it failed.

When it came to my husband, he had a referral.

Thio urologist come to find out he also had a very low sperm count.

Did it another time with more medications.

Now that failed and we ended up doing six.

Um, I you guys all ended up in failure, all with my O b g y n when I probably should have been going to a fertility specialist at the time.

Thankfully, our o b g y n, she said.

Hey, I think this is a good time to stop.

We need to move forward with more aggressive treatment.

We need to send you to a fertility clinic, and you need to see what's called an Ari I, which is a reproductive endocrinologist.

You finally got that console.

We met with her doctor.

Everything that I had done at our O B g y n was pretty much scrapped, he said.

You know, we're going to start over again because I need fresh eyes on this.

They were checking for Peyton, see in my tubes with the history of Champagne.

Geo Graham.

What they dio with an H S G is they actually shoot dye into your fallopian tubes to see if they're blocked.

They also were testing my husband again.

Comes to find out we were given a 5% chance, have been able to conceive naturally on her own, and that's not a really good percentage.

The next approach, our fertility doctor at the time said, Okay, we need to kind of move forward with IVF, which is in vitro fertilization.

So that's what we did.

And what they're doing is they're trying to make your body produces many egg follicles as possible so that they can have the best chances at fertilizing as many eggs as they possibly can.

They picked the best of his boys the best of my eggs, and they injected the sperm in each one.

And that's what created an embryo.

So you start ramping up your medication protocol, you start taking start taking.

These wonderful estrogen patch is usually you wrap up with, like one, and then you all of a sudden have like three or four on your abdomen, and that's that's a lot of estrogen.

Then you take vaginal estrogen called s trees.

Then you take other medications, which are injectables rejected them into your stomach daily.

I think at one point I had up to about 4 to 5 shots a day.

My husband was my shooter.

You have to take these shots at a specific time every day and so there were times when we're at a wedding and I we have to sneak off into a back room and he asked, Give me a shot.

So my husband is a lot like me, and we like to try to find ways to make, you know, just turn a situation positive.

That's so negative.

And so every single round that we did, we, um we would put a bead one for each shot that we did through IVF.

Um, and each bead represents a shot.

Our whole life revolved around shots in a calendar and nothing else mattered.

We would pay anywhere from 3 to $5000 just on medications, and that's no insurance.

It's out of pocket.

And then you go into the actual IVF round in that averages anywhere from 10 to 15,000.

So, September 2010 we had our first IVF treatment.

You go into the O.

R.

And you go under general anesthesia.

We went in there just beaming with hope.

It's supposed to work all this money, thousands and thousands of dollars that we just spit.

This is going to work two weeks later, and a lot of tests we get a phone call.

I'm really sorry it didn't work.

Come back when in when you're ready and we'll talk about, you know, next steps.

We knew that there was a probability that the first IVF wouldn't work.

Kind of knew that it may take a couple of rounds, but we did have a lot of hope thinking that it was gonna work for us.

And when it didn't work, it was crushing.

Our fertility specialist said, You know it, we're gonna We're gonna look around.

I want to do an exploratory surgery to see if something something's going on that that I just missed.

And so I had what's called a history.

Rosco p.

They went in to get into mutual biopsy, so they just took a little in a typical sample to test my uterine lining.

To maybe see why.

Why is nothing implanting?

What he found is there's a few polyps, which is, I mean, it's not normal, but it Z it's an easy thing to remove.

So he removed that took a sample on Dhe, noticed that I had a light film on the lining of my uterus.

He removed that and we were able to move forward with our second IVF.

So then, February 2011 we tried again, which will Then, in March, we tried again for 1/3 frozen embryo transfer, and that failed in June 2011.

Our doctor advised that maybe we should do another surgery to see what's going on so he doesn't.

I learned history, Rosco P notices.

There's another film that is on the inside of my uterus again.

And so it takes that biopsies that from that biopsy he notices that the cells have started to change.

Um, whereas before Hannah had what's called hyperplasia and now it has turned into a moderate, um, hyperplasia that can lead and into more Communist things.

You know, with every IVF treatment, every surgery that we had going on at the time, they would transfer over these beautiful embryos and they just would not implant.

And it was so frustrating for everyone involved because everything was perfect.

So February 2012 we had a history Oscar de.

We wanted to see if the's cells were growing back, what was happening, and guess what.

They're still there, and they're getting worse and they're progressing.

So my hyperplasia started become more complex, and, um, our fertility clinics started to be a little bit more concerned.

My oncologist and my Ari, I really worked together to try to come up with a plan.

They were like, Look, we want Thio.

We want to try to make your mother, but we're looking here at this window, It's not looking good.

Meaning we're gonna go ahead, try to treat this this hyperplasia with prednisone, which made me very hungry and cranky and angry all the same time.

July 2012.

We did a fresh round of IVF because we were out of embryos at the time and we needed to start fresh and, um and after treating potential threat that we had with the hyperplasia, we felt really good going into this, that IVF failed.

And that was really hard to deal with.

Because at this point, you know, we just keep on throwing money down this, like black hole.

My O b g y oncologist gave me a timeline.

He said, Look, um, you're you're hyperplasia is turning into the beginning stages of uterine cancer.

I want to give you a cz much opportunity as we can have a child, but you have a very small window.

My reproductive endocrinologist and my oncologist, they got together that a team huddle and said, You know what?

This is Your last shot, Candace.

We're gonna go through one more a round of IVF.

We're gonna give it all we can, D'oh!

And then after that, you're gonna have to have a hysterectomy because your chances of uterine cancer are right here.

So we need to go ahead and start deciding on what the next steps are.

December 2012 was our last round of IVF that we had transferred to me and, um, it failed.

I'd already been preparing myself before that transfer.

The writing was on the wall.

At this point.

I mean, come on.

I mean, we got a call at time of death.

This isn't working.

So for the first couple years, we were completely silent.

We did not tell anyone.

I was ashamed.

I was embarrassed.

I felt broken.

Husband felt broken.

We fell less than because all of her friends were able to have these beautiful babies.

And infertility really was a thief of all joy.

Because you're really happy for someone else who was able to do this.

But you're so incredibly sad for yourself.

And so we didn't share a lot of this.

I had already started looking at adoption agencies, and people don't realize it's not like you can just go out and pick out this cute little kid.

The reality of it is, is it costs anywhere from 26,000 to 60,000.

At that point, we were like, OK, you know, we're adopting.

This is happening but that was really difficult.

It was a very angry time in my life because we would make awesome parents and we are getting drilled.

We have to fill out all this, all this paperwork, stacks of paperwork like you wouldn't even imagine.

And then we are putting every single bit of her life under the microscope.

I had to ask questions about my intimacy life files in college.

Why, I have no idea.

Because, frankly, it wasn't under business.

The adoption process, although it was really angry stage in my life, was actually one of a time where I could actually breathe again because it moved from no longer if, but when we would be parents and I could actually start thinking about a nursery.

There were some opportunities that did come up, and we once had a birth mom come up to us and say Hey, I where I'm looking to place my child.

And we wanna place my child with you and your husband.

And subsequently it didn't work out because she miscarried.

And during all of that, we started fundraising because at this point, we had already exhausted all of our, um, funds for treatment.

In that quest, we had a friend of mine.

Her little sister had been a gestational carrier and she saw a post on social media about us fundraising for an adoption.

And she sent me a message.

Um, and she said, I've been a gestational carrier before.

If you're interested, I would love to carry for you.

Let's talk.

And I ignored that message because my husband and I, we were gonna do adoptions.

And we had already said Surrogacy is not an option for us.

It's just not the way we can afford it.

One number two Only movie stars do that right.

We don't have a trust fund.

Thing isn't happening.

We had this opportunity, this amazing opportunity for someone to carry our child from our previous fresh cycle.

Way back in July 2012 we had embryos, and even though he had multiple IVF rounds.

After that, we had two remaining embryos that were frozen.

Let's do this so we were able to fundraise fair amount.

Actually, Thio move forward with our surrogacy.

We had a surrogate and we now needed to resource a lawyer, a lawyer who specializes in reproductive law.