The Post Where I Tell You Everything (Or: How a Fat, Geriatric Woman Finally Got Her Baby)

Let’s start with the label, because you’re going to hear it a lot around here.

Geriatric pregnancy. It sounds like something that should come with a walker and a AARP membership, but in the medical world it simply means you’re pregnant at 35 or older. I was 37 when my husband and I started trying to conceive after we got married in 2017, which meant I was going to wear that label no matter what. I accepted it immediately and decided if that’s what they wanted to call it, I was going to own it.

What I didn’t know in 2017 was that “geriatric” would end up being the least of my problems, and that it would take nine years, five fertility clinics, one round of IVF, a donor egg, donor sperm, and two incredibly generous human beings to get here.

But we got here. And this is that story.

2017-2019: Newlyweds With a Plan

We got married in 2017 with every intention of growing our family. I already had a son, and my husband, his stepfather, had been in his life since he was six years old. So, we weren’t naive about what parenting looked like. We knew it was hard. We wanted it anyway.

We started trying naturally first, because that’s what you do. We were optimistic. We were in love. We figured it would happen. We knew it wouldn’t happen right away (it took me a year to get pregnant with my son when I was 27, though he was conceived without assistance), but we were sure it would happen eventually.

It didn’t.

By 2019 we had our first consultation for IVF and jumped in. And then we were told “no”. My BMI was too high, and they wouldn’t treat us until I lost over 100 lbs. They prescribed medical weight loss. I decided to get a second opinion.

And that doctor was worse than the first. I left that appointment in tears, with an order for a type 2 diabetes test in hand, and a (rudely delivered) reassurance that if I lost weight, it would happen.

(Spoiler: I did not have type 2 diabetes, and I later lost weight, and it did not happen.)

2021: The Year We Were Told No (Again and Again)

If I had to pick a lowest point in nine years of trying (and that is genuinely a competitive field) it would be 2021.

We were at our third clinic. I was 41. We had been through more appointments, more tests, more hope-and-crash cycles than I can count. And after our second round of testing at that clinic, we got the diagnosis we had been circling for years: both female factor and male factor infertility. A two-for-one special nobody wants.

And then came the part that still makes me angry when I think about it.

For the third time, we were told they couldn’t help us, not without me losing a significant amount of weight first. Three clinics. Three versions of the same conversation. The message was clear: your body is the problem, fix it, then come back.

I want to be careful here because I’m not interested in making this blog a place of bitterness. But I do want to be honest, because I know I’m not the only person who has sat in that chair and been sent home with a BMI lecture instead of a treatment plan. The weight-based gatekeeping in fertility care is real, it is widespread, and it costs people genetic children they will never get back. For us, by the time we found clinics willing to work with us, a genetically related child was no longer medically on the table.

I’m not going to pretend that didn’t sting. It did.

What I can tell you is that by 2021, after everything we had been through, Andrew and I had already quietly arrived at a place of peace about it. We had built a family in every way that mattered. We knew that a child didn’t need to share our DNA to be ours completely. The grief was real, but so was the clarity. We wanted a baby, and we were going to find a way.

2024: Finally, A Green Light

After years of no, 2024 gave us something we hadn’t had in a long time: options.

We found two clinics willing to work with us on donor egg and donor sperm embryo creation and transfer. Two clinics that looked at our full picture and said yes instead of sending us home with a pamphlet about weight loss. I cannot overstate how much that meant after years of closed doors.

We ultimately chose CNY Fertility, and if you’re in the infertility community, you probably already know the name. For those who don’t, CNY is one of the most affordable fertility clinics in the country, which mattered enormously to us because at my age, insurance coverage for IVF was no longer an option. We were paying out of pocket, and CNY made that possible in a way that other clinics simply didn’t. (This is not a paid endorsement; I certainly can speak to the downsides of CNY as well, and that will likely be another post altogether.)

The process of choosing a donor egg and donor sperm is its own surreal experience that deserves its own post (and it will get one). But what I want you to know is that somewhere out there are two people whose generosity made our daughter possible. I think about them more than they will ever know. The gratitude I feel is not something I have words for yet, but I’m going to keep trying to find them.

As an aside, between 2021 and 2024, I went on GLP-1 medications and lost 75 lbs and even though these two clinics said yes, I contacted three others who still said no. Fortunately, I didn’t schedule appointments with these places, I vetted them via phone or email so as to not waste time or subject us to more heartache.

The Part Nobody Warns You About: PGT-A Testing

Here’s something the fertility world doesn’t advertise loudly enough: matching with a donor is not the finish line. It’s not even close.

After the emotional marathon of selecting our donors, we had our embryos created and sent for PGT-A testing. For the uninitiated, PGT-A is preimplantation genetic testing that screens embryos for chromosomal abnormalities before transfer. It’s somewhat controversial (another topic that will eventually get its own post), though on paper it sounds like a straightforward quality check. We opted to do the testing to avoid spending additional time and money transferring aneuploid (chromosomally abnormal) embryos.

What nobody fully prepares you for is opening those results and seeing zero viable embryos.

Zero.

All that hope, all that coordination, all that money, and we were starting over. New donors. New costs. New everything. The particular cruelty of that moment is hard to describe to someone who hasn’t lived it. You’ve already done the hard emotional work of choosing donors, of letting go of genetic connection, of getting excited about embryos that felt like the beginning of something. And then the lab calls and the number is zero and you have to somehow find the reserves to do it all again.

We found them. We started over. We chose again. Our second donor wound up with no eggs retrieved. Back to square one, again.

Our third try was the charm. After PGT-A testing, we had the embryo that would go on to be our daughter.

December 2025: Surreal Doesn’t Cover It

In mid-December, 2025, we had our first embryo transfer after nine years of waiting. Shortly before Christmas, I took a pregnancy test.

It was positive.

I’m not sure what I expected to feel. After nine years, you’d think it would be pure unbridled joy, and there was joy, absolutely. But the overwhelming feeling was something closer to surreal. Like my brain couldn’t quite process that the thing we had been working toward for nearly a decade was actually, finally, happening.

Honestly? It still feels surreal sometimes. But then she moves, or we see her on the ultrasound, and it gets a little more real every time. She is in there. She is ours. She is coming.

She’s due in late summer. And she has absolutely no idea how long we waited for her.

So, Why This Blog?

Because when I was in the thick of it, the testing and the waiting and the clinic appointments and the diagnoses and the grief, I would have given anything to find a voice that was honest about all of it without being either devastatingly bleak or relentlessly sunny.

I wanted someone who would tell me the hard parts and then make me laugh about them. Someone who understood the particular exhaustion of being a geriatric patient in a system that is not always built for you. Someone who had been through donor conception and come out the other side with something to say about it.

I’m going to try to be that person.

This blog is for the women still in the waiting room. For the ones who just got the diagnosis they dreaded. For the ones who are 40-something and pregnant and terrified and thrilled and Googling “geriatric pregnancy” at 2am, wondering what happens next.

I see you. Pull up a chair.

We have a lot to talk about.