I have not written much about IVF because I never did the procedure. Also, my predecessors on this blog have covered this topic in the IVF category. However, I stumbled across an article about IVF yesterday that caught my attention.
This is not your typical IVF story. In fact, it starts out with a terrible tragedy. Lori Coble was driving on the highway in her minivan with her mother in the passenger seat and her three children, a boy and two girls, ages 5, 4, and 2, in the back seat. While the traffic was moving rapidly in the other lanes, the traffic was backed up in the right lane because of slow moving traffic on the exit ramp.
Let me interject here that my attorney friends have told me to never, ever get in a stopped lane on a highway, even if it means you have to take a different exit to get where you are going. Numerous people are injured every year because drivers on the highway have no way of knowing that the traffic in the right lane is stopped as they are coming around the bend, and they wind up plowing into the stopped cars.
This is what happened to Lori Coble and her family, only it was a tractor-trailer that plowed into their minivan. All three children were killed, and Lori Coble and her mother were injured.
I cannot imagine surviving this loss. It is a testament to this woman’s strength that she was able to get out of bed again. Her husband, Chris, who was not involved in the accident, was devastated as well.
The couple felt like they were parents without children, so they sought to have more children. They turned to IVF to accomplish this. The article does not say why they needed IVF. I speculate that perhaps one of them had surgery to prevent another pregnancy, never imagining the possibility of losing all three children at such a young age.
Regardless of why, the couple underwent IVF and fertilized 10 of Lori’s eggs. Three of the eggs became viable embryos. According to the article, there was only a 10% chance of this happening. The doctor wanted to implant two of the embryos, but the couple chose to implant all three.
Guess what? All three embryos attached, and Lori is now pregnant with triplets – one boy and two girls, which is the same gender make up of the three children they lost.
Of course, these three babies can never replace the three children that were lost, and the couple is still in counseling for working through their grief over losing their children intermixed with the joy of expecting three babies. However, there is such a beauty in the way things worked out through IVF.
Photo credit: Lynda Bernhardt
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