Brandon and I knew almost immediately that we wanted to be together forever. We knew it years before we got married. We talked about having a child together, and at the beginning of 2025, we decided to start trying.
There is something important I should add here. Brandon and I met in our late thirties, and I had never had the chance – or perhaps had never seriously considered the need to freeze my eggs. At thirty-eight, I felt more like thirty or thirty-two, if that makes sense.
I was healthy. I was active. I took care of myself. And somewhere in my mind, I had created a very simple equation: if I was healthy, if my partner was healthy, and if we both lived active lives and ate well, then our fertility should be fine too.
Fortunately, Brandon and I really were active people. We loved sports, healthy food, and taking care of ourselves. We did our annual checkups. We checked the usual things: thyroid levels, ferritin, antibodies to different viruses, and other basic markers.
The one thing I had not checked before we started trying for a baby was my fertility, necessary performances such as AMH, FSH, progesterone, and many more. Brandon had not checked his either. Looking back, perhaps that was a mistake, considering that I was thirty-seven, almost 38, and Brandon was forty at the time.
For some reason, I believed that if all the standard blood tests came back normal, that was a good enough starting point for having a baby. We tried for about three months.
I still remember June 2025.
One of my friends flew in from Germany, and we were having the most beautiful California summer. We drove to the ocean in Malibu, ate seafood, walked for hours, talked about everything, and simply enjoyed time together.
Then I realized my period was late.
I waited three or four days before taking a pregnancy test because I was convinced it was probably just a small change in my cycle.
I did not expect to get pregnant so quickly.
But I did.
It happened during our third cycle of trying.
We were happy, surprised, and perhaps a little stunned. Suddenly, we were trying to imagine what our life would look like from that moment forward.
Brandon ordered mugs online for our parents with the words, “You have been promoted.” When we visited his parents, we shared the news while secretly filming their reaction. Everyone cried. We cried too.
We were happy, overwhelmed, and trying to understand that a completely new chapter of our lives had quietly begun.
We already had a trip to Hawaii planned for July, and we decided not to cancel it.
I will be honest: traveling while pregnant, only about four weeks after the positive test, was more challenging than I expected.I was constantly tired.
Normally, I love being active. I hike, surf, exercise, and usually want to fit as much as possible into every day.
Suddenly, my body had other plans. And then, on Maui, something happened that I will probably never forget. It was our second-to-last day on the island.
From early morning, the news was filled with warnings about a possible massive tsunami moving toward Hawaii. Emergency alerts were going off. People were being told to evacuate. And at that exact moment, Brandon and I were on a road trip to a part of the island completely opposite side from our Airbnb. We were worried.
There was this strange tension in the air, the kind that makes every decision feel important.
Should we evacuate?
Where were we supposed to go?
Should we stay at the highest point of the island, as far from the ocean as possible?
But what about our luggage?
Our passports were back at the apartment. I think I had even left my wallet there because I did not want to carry it during a long hike. I had taken only the essentials: a credit card, my phone, a charger, and my driver’s license. Driving back from our hike near Hana and Honokalani, we were incredibly anxious.
I remember being hungry and saying to Brandon, “We are not going to make a good decision about what to do next if we’re starving.” So we stopped for a quick lunch at the nearest food truck and then bought water and basic supplies from a supermarket.
The atmosphere inside that store was unforgettable. Everyone’s phones were ringing. Emergency alerts kept going off. People were speaking loudly, calling family members, checking maps, trying to decide where to go.
Did being pregnant make that moment feel different? Completely.
I felt an enormous sense of responsibility for our lives. And I could see that Brandon felt it too. He immediately started figuring out what we needed to do. He found a radio station giving continuous updates and evacuation information.
We calculated our time. We had approximately three hours. One hour to return to the apartment and collect our things.
Another hour to pack the car and reach the evacuation point – a local school located far enough and high enough from the ocean to be considered safe.
The tsunami never came. Thankfully.
But, not long afterward, something else happened.
I lost the pregnancy.
After returning home to Los Angeles, I had a routine ultrasound appointment with my OB/GYN.
She found a normal heartbeat. Everything appeared to be fine. And then, three days later, I started bleeding. Brandon and I were terrified.We went to the emergency room. There was an enormous wait. We spent more than ten hours there, moving through long stretches of waiting between blood tests, scans, and laboratory work.
During those hours, I kept running to the bathroom and seeing that the bleeding had not stopped.
I did not know what was happening to me.Everything felt blurred. I was frightened, devastated, and desperate not to lose our baby. Eventually, I was taken into the emergency department on a hospital bed.
And we continued waiting.
We were told that the doctor working that night had to perform a C-section somewhere on the seventh floor and that she would come to us as soon as she was available. Sometime in the middle of the night – or perhaps even later – she finally came. She reviewed the scan. Then she told us there was no longer a heartbeat. There are moments in life when the world seems to divide itself into a before and an after.
For me, that was one of them.
We were given two options: the first was medication that would allow my body to pass the pregnancy tissue naturally at home, the second was a D&C, a medical procedure performed in the hospital.I chose the medication. I think I heard the word “natural” and, perhaps naively, assumed that natural automatically meant better for my body.
I continued bleeding for another three weeks.
The pregnancy tissue remained inside my body, and eventually I ended up back in the emergency room and had the D&C anyway. I do not regret that procedure.
Afterward, I finally felt a sense of closure. A final goodbye. A kind of release.
It is difficult to put into words what the following three months felt like.
The most important thing was that Brandon was always beside me.
The support of your partner during something like this is impossible to overestimate. I also had to keep believing in myself.
I meditated a lot. I wrote letters to my unborn baby. I painted. I spent time with Brandon’s family. I continued focusing on work. And I tried not to lock myself inside the darkest rooms of my own mind. I focused on recovery. And I researched. A lot.
I watched videos with reproductive endocrinologists and fertility doctors. I learned about miscarriage, female fertility, male fertility, egg quality, age, and reproductive health.
I did not want to remain in the darkness of not knowing what had happened to me.
The more I learned, the easier it became.
Actually, “easier” is not quite the right word.I felt significantly better because I finally had knowledge. And knowledge gave me tools.
For the first time after the loss, I felt that I could move forward on our journey toward growing our family and, hopefully, having a healthy future pregnancy.
The experience made both of us understand, even more deeply, how much becoming parents meant to us. Our first practical step was fertility testing. About six months after the miscarriage, I checked my AMH level. I also tested FSH, estradiol, my thyroid again, and many other fertility-related markers. Brandon and I did genetic testing together.
He also had a semen analysis to check, among other things, sperm motility. By then, I was thirty-nine and Brandon was forty-one. We decided that we did not want to sit back and wait. We wanted to be proactive.
We began looking for a fertility clinic and a reproductive specialist who could help us understand our options and decide what to do next.
Around this time, I began catching myself thinking about something I had tried not to think about before.
I wished I had frozen my eggs before I turned thirty-five.
Egg freezing had been somewhere in the background of my life for almost ten years.
Some of my friends had done it.
Others had talked about whether they should.
But I had never seriously considered what it could mean for me.
After experiencing a missed miscarriage, I began to understand something I had not fully understood before.
Being healthy and feeling young do not directly determine the quality of our eggs.
Age matters.
As women, we can be forty and look twenty-five.
We can feel twenty-five.
We can exercise, eat beautifully, travel, work, fall in love, and feel as though life is only beginning.
But our eggs still age.
And that has a direct relationship with fertility and reproductive outcomes.
The statistics around miscarriage after the age of thirty-five can be difficult to read.
But reading them made me think.
Deeply.
I want to be careful here because every woman is different.
Every body is different.
Every fertility story is different.
I can only speak for myself.
I was one of the women who simply did not know enough about these things.
My mother had never talked to me about them either.
But I do not want to blame society or other women for the lack of information, because the information does exist.
There are podcasts.
Interviews.
Articles.
Doctors sharing educational content.
Social media accounts devoted entirely to fertility and reproductive health.
I will always stand on the side of women, and with my whole heart I hope that no woman has to go through what I experienced.
But I also want to say this:
A healthy lifestyle is an important part of fertility, but understanding your body on a deeper level through fertility testing is another level of awareness entirely.
It gives us the opportunity to ask questions before life forces us to ask them.
Do I want to become a mother?
Am I ready for pregnancy?
Am I emotionally prepared for the possibility that something may not go according to plan?
What options do I have if I cannot become pregnant naturally?
How much time might I have?
Why would I freeze my eggs?
What happens to frozen eggs afterward?
If I am not ready to become pregnant now because of my career, relationships, finances, or other circumstances, what choices do I have?
Who should I talk to?
Which clinic should I choose?
How much will it cost?
Can I afford it?
What are my first steps?
After completing my fertility tests, I learned that my AMH level was 1.64.
I was pleasantly surprised.
I would not describe that number as either “good” or “bad.” It was simply a solid, average result for me at thirty-nine.
But age remains a very important part of the conversation.
And I want to say something to women with a lower AMH level: if you are younger, age and egg quality may still be meaningful factors in your individual situation.
This is exactly why these conversations should happen with a qualified reproductive specialist before making decisions about egg freezing.
In my case, after receiving our test results, Brandon and I had several consultations with doctors in both the United States and Europe.
I also spoke with friends who had already frozen their eggs and asked them about their experiences.
After months of research, I began seriously considering doing the egg retrieval procedure in Europe.
Fortunately, I knew several people who had already gone through fertility treatment there.
Suddenly, another possibility appeared.
Maybe we could travel abroad, spend time together, and also do something meaningful for our future family.
The idea stayed with us.
The more Brandon and I discussed it, the more seriously we considered Europe.
I researched clinics, studied the information available online, and eventually found IVF-Life in Spain.
The clinic has locations in Madrid, Alicante, and San Sebastián.
We booked a free consultation.
After meeting with the reproductive specialist, we became even more certain that starting with an egg retrieval procedure could give us valuable information about our fertility and our chances of becoming parents.
Brandon and I decided to do the egg retrieval and see what happened.
Of course, we hope for the best.
We hope to have a healthy pregnancy.
To welcome a healthy child.
To become parents.
And to continue growing ourselves so that we can become better people too.
We genuinely believe that a child would be an extension of our love and a new chapter in the life of our family.
We are already working toward that future.
And that gives me so much hope.
In some ways, my journey toward becoming a mother has already begun.
I feel inspired by that.
I feel full of purpose.
We packed our carry-on suitcases and flew to Alicante, Spain, to meet our doctor and begin the next part of the journey.
I had never felt as safe and calm in a medical environment in Los Angeles as I felt when I walked into the clinic in Spain.
We had hundreds of questions for the coordinators.
They met every question with patience.
The warmth of the welcome and the atmosphere of the clinic gave us even more confidence in our decision.
Our doctor, Dr. María Isabel Herrera, was knowledgeable, clear, and direct.
She explained the entire egg retrieval process to us.
The reproductive specialists also gave us an introductory lesson on what happens in the laboratory after eggs are retrieved from the body.
We learned how sperm is selected.
We learned about the stages an egg goes through after fertilization.
We learned what happens when eggs and embryos are frozen.
For the first time, the process did not feel like some mysterious medical world happening behind closed doors.
We were beginning to understand it.
And understanding made me feel calmer.
Our trip to Alicante to meet Dr. Isabel Herrera and seeing the clinic with our own eyes was important for us, but surprisingly, it also felt light. Almost like a vacation. Alicante turned out to be a beautiful city with incredible food. And then there was the cost of the procedure. The egg retrieval procedure was approximately two times less expensive than what we had been considering in California. For us, cost was an important factor. Of course, it was not the only one. A clinic’s reputation matters. Patient experiences matter. Transparency matters. The attitude of the staff matters. And perhaps most importantly, feeling that you can communicate openly with your doctor matters. But price is also a real consideration. Fertility treatment can be expensive, and pretending that finances do not influence these decisions would not be honest. My own experience with the medical system in Los Angeles had also affected me. After the trauma of sitting in an emergency room waiting area for hours during one of the most painful experiences of my life, and then spending months recovering while trying to get clear answers about my fertility, I often felt as though I had reached a dead end.
I want to make something clear. I am not saying that this is everyone’s experience. I am speaking only about mine. But after my miscarriage, I desperately wanted someone to help me understand the next steps.
What should I do now?
How could I improve my chances of becoming pregnant?
What should we test?
What should we know?
What options did we have?
I wanted a plan.
At the clinic in Spain, I finally felt that my questions were being answered. Our coordinator, Carmen Juárez, had an enormous heart, a genuine love for her work, and a rare talent for helping people like us – people who arrive carrying approximately one million questions. And Dr. Isabel Herrera gave us clarity and confidence as we began the process.
We are not wearing rose-colored glasses. We understand that fertility treatment does not come with guarantees. We understand that hope and certainty are not the same thing. But Brandon and I are proud of ourselves for making this decision. We are proud that we chose to take action. We stayed in Spain for three weeks under the care of the IVF-Life team.
And there is so much more I want to tell you. About the injections. The emotions. The appointments. The waiting. The egg retrieval itself. The moments of hope, the moments of fear, and everything that happened in between at IVF-Life.
That is the next part of the story.
