I have 2 I can add.
1. When I was 7 my mom was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. I remember my dad coming into the living room to tell me and my sister. I remember pretending to cry because I didn’t really understand what exactly that meant but my dad and my sister were crying so I thought I should too. I was told that it was caught early enough and she’d be ok. The next 7 years were a roller coaster of “this has gotten worse” and “she’s going to be fine”. Multiple surgeries and chemo as it metastasized to her colon. My mom wasn’t fat, but full figured. Between the multiple rounds of chemo and the multiple sections of her colon being removed she was down under 90 pounds and had to walk with a walker. I vividly remember being 14 and frustrated/scared/embarrassed and being impatient at her needing to use a walker one day to get out to the car. She died not long after. I chose to not be in the hospital the day they unplugged the machines keeping her alive. That’s the last memory I have of her. I’ve never fully forgiven myself for that.
During the last few years of my mom’s life, my dad’s mom got alzheimer's. It was pretty ugly for my dad. She died a year and 10 days after my mom. All things considered, my dad did a remarkable job leading my sister and me through all of it. Looking back at it decades later I can see how much that time period broke him. I wish I was less of a shit head for him through that and a few years after.
2. May 25th 2019, 3 days after my daughter’s 3rd birthday. My wife, 32 weeks pregnant with our second daughter, had gone to the hospital because she hadn’t felt the baby move in a while. It was late at night, our 3 year old was asleep upstairs when my wife called. There was no heartbeat. Our baby was dead. I had to wait around for my sister in law to get to the house so I could go down to the hospital. Holding my wife’s hand as she sobbed, delivering a lifeless baby was excruciating. After the delivery, the placenta didn’t detach and she was bleeding pretty badly. They had to rush her out to the OR. So there I was sitting alone in a hospital room, moments after they wheeled our dead baby out, moments after they rushed my wife to the OR, not sure if she was going to die or not, thinking about my 3 year old sleeping at home. That was the single hardest moment of my life.
They were able to stop the bleeding and moved my wife to the icu. They weren’t able to get all of the placenta out so there would need to be some follow up procedure to take care of that. My wife would be fine. We comforted ourselves with the fact that she was ok, and after she healed up, and we mourned the loss we could have another baby. The follow up appointments and MRI showed that the placenta had grown through the wall of the uterus. She had to have a hysterectomy. There wouldn’t be another baby.
A year or so after that my wife started having severe, unrelated, health issues in her colon. Probably 12 ER visits over 24 months, half a dozen colonoscopies, they thought it might be crohns, through all of the hospital stays and repeated rounds of antibiotics, she had developed recurrent CDIFF. Ultimately they got that under control and cauterized part of the inside of her colon that has seemingly been resolved. With all of the physical pain she was in through all of that they kept her on a pretty consistent diet of narcotics, which also made the emotional pain disappear temporarily. That combination lead to a pretty severe narcotics dependency. A year and a few months ago she took the steps to move beyond that, and a really difficult year later she’s in a much better place. she’s still not the person she was before the still birth, and part of me wonders if she’ll ever be able to be as truly happy as she was before that.
Now, with all of that hopefully behind us, we’re in a position to start to move forward with surrogacy. Every meeting and appointment we’ve had so far has yielded positive results, but I’ve been so beaten down by the last 4 years that it’s so hard to have real genuine hope for something because I keep just waiting to be kicked back down again.