Featured in the RNE Magazine, 2023 Volume 3
By C.C.
It was just a day after my emergency hysterectomy.
My husband came into my hospital room, leaned over to give me a kiss and asked how I was feeling since the surgery. After hearing about how I was doing post-op, he sat down on the edge of my hospital bed and said quietly “I was thinking.”
“What?” I asked, still exhausted from my lack of sleep on the noisy hospital floor.
“Why don’t we use a gestational surrogate to try to have another baby? We have eight frozen embryos from our last few IVF cycles, and we can transfer those into the surrogate.”
I groaned thinking about the complexity of using a gestational carrier and couldn’t fully process what he was saying. I hadn’t heard much about the process aside from hearing about a few movie stars who had utilized surrogacy. I told him I was not ready to even think about how we would build our family right now and that the idea of gestational surrogacy seemed very daunting. He agreed to drop the subject and just focus on my physical and psychological healing from the very emotional experience of having an emergency hysterectomy in my mid-30s.
Months passed and I began to think about my husband’s idea of surrogacy a bit more.