Woman Had A Baby, Then Contractions Kicked In Again Seven Weeks Later

Not that Sarah is a stranger to hard work: she loves it. Yes, not content with one career path, she swapped a career as a high flier for a second work chapter in the fashion industry. Her husband, Chris Schonberger may not have such a recognizable face, but he too is a successful entrepreneur, creating and producing web shows watched by millions.

Still, having a baby was, as we noted, an uphill struggle. Sarah had to fit tons of meetings with doctors into her busy days. Add to this ups and downs with her weight and the problems of clothing a body that regularly changed shape; it all proved tough work for the entrepreneuse. On top of that, she had to overcome an extremely rare condition that made having a child at all unlikely.

The company that Sarah started, M.M.LaFleur, grew out of her fury at her wardrobe. She felt she didn’t have anything good to work in, viewing herself as at the mercy of ill-fitting and poor-quality clothes. So she started a company with designer Miyako Nakamura focusing on a range of workwear. It was a great hit, pulling in millions.

Sarah’s choice of man wasn’t bad either. Chris had started his own media concern, First We Feast. It was a successful blog that branched out into YouTube. The show that made its name was Hot Ones, to which 3 million people subscribe. In it, host Sean Evans chats with celebrities over some very hot wings.

The two had first got together back in their college days. But their 20s weren’t exactly a blossoming love story. Sarah worked incessantly in the corporate world, with barely a moment to take a breath, let alone spend time with Chris. It wasn’t until 2015 that they were able to find time for each other and get married.

Enduring such a busy schedule, Sarah’d had no thoughts of starting a family. But as she entered her 30s, her priorities began to shift. Two years after her marriage, she was still arranging her wedding party — but children were on her mind. As she later told magazine Marie Claire, she was thinking, “Oh my gosh, I need to be careful not to get pregnant because I don’t want to be pregnant at my wedding party.”

That’s because Sarah was convinced that she’d get pregnant as soon as she started trying. And after the wedding party, the couple really started to focus on increasing their family. They finally had the money for it, with her company starting to get properly onto its feet. So the time seemed right.

It so happened that a girlfriend of Sarah’s who had been trying to have a baby for a year or so had begun to see a fertility expert. She told Sarah that she wished she had known a few things when she’d started. So she advised going to see the specialist before even starting on the process of trying.

The specialist, though, when he heard how long they’d been trying — not at all yet — just snorted. He said to come back when they had been trying to get in the family way for six months. But, Sarah told Marie Claire magazine in 2020, he did say, “If you really want to run some basic tests, we can do that.”

But one of those tests seemed a bit more than “basic.” It involved being put into a sort of stirrups and pumped full of dye. The pain brought tears to Sarah’s eyes, and the news afterwards was disturbing. The doctor had only seen one fallopian tube. Soon after, Sarah was on her way to hospital in significant pain.

There, another doctor found that Sarah did indeed have a problem: she had a unicornuate uterus. Now while that might sound cute, it very much isn’t. Sarah had only one-half of a uterus and a single fallopian tube. This condition is not at all common, but when it occurs, the result is often infertility.

The main concern with having such a condition was that while Sarah might in fact become pregnant, her foetus would be unlikely to survive. She might well miscarry after a few months or deliver prematurely. When the couple spoke to a specialist, they asked whether she really wanted to endure the likely outcome of pregnancy, adding perhaps she should think about other paths to expanding her family?

Fewer than one in 500 women has a unicornuate uterus, and of course, it’s not visible to their friends and family. Lots of people just couldn’t understand why a healthy woman would have issues with pregnancy. But Sarah was stuck with this condition, which even doctors didn’t know much about. And as she told Marie Claire, a lot of them said she should just go for surrogacy.

Well, the couple considered surrogacy, but initially, they felt uncomfortable with the idea, and decided to just give getting pregnant a go. Sure enough, one happy day Sarah saw a line on the pee stick, and suddenly she was excited. Delighted by the idea of being pregnant, she passed on wine at lunch with a good friend — a treat she’d normally have insisted on.

But when Sarah traveled back to her office after that lunch, she could feel that her period was starting. And when the bleed just went on and on, she knew that she’d miscarried. The same pattern would occur a couple more times. So she knew she could get pregnant, but it didn’t seem like a baby would ever result.

So the couple tried out in vitro fertilization, beginning in February 2018. Unfortunately, the clinic could only get a few eggs on the first cycle. In the end, the seven that were harvested ended up with only three fertilized and viable. So one was transferred, but there was to be no joyful news this time.

A specialist informed Sarah that the cramping she experienced at period time might be down to endometriosis. This is another little-known condition, but there was a test. She did have it, and that meant she needed treatment. But before that began, there was an opportunity to grab some more eggs.

Second time around, the process ended with some good embryos. And medication dealt with the endometriosis, although it was an unpleasant treatment involving experiences similar to the menopause. Still, two months later, Sarah was all set for a fresh transfer of a fertilized embryo. But to the puzzlement of her doctor, it failed again.

Once more, the experts told Sarah that surrogacy was her best bet. But there was another option. She could try another fertility clinic that did some “autoimmune stuff,” right at the bounds of science. This definitely was not your regular IVF treatment, but Sarah was ready to give it a go.

So the new doctors confirmed that the entrepreneuse had endometriosis and needed surgery. Then she’d have the experimental treatments. And because this was right out on the edge, they came at a high price: Sarah was looking at $3,000-plus a week for several weeks. This wouldn’t even cover the many other meds that she was also taking.

The whole fertility process seemed to be getting out of hand. Just fitting the appointments into the business owner’s hectic schedule was difficult. And the business itself was taxing, demanding huge amounts of her time.

Unwilling to just give up, Sarah prepared to double down. But in January 2019 she was due to undergo a transfusion, a five-hour process. And she admitted to Marie Claire that when she came to schedule it, she’d had a realization. She just couldn’t spare five hours for this: it had all become too crazy. So she quit the whole fertility roundabout, canceling the appointment with no intention of ever rescheduling it.

So the couple went with the route that had been suggested to them so often: surrogacy. Sarah matched with a woman called Trisha, who lived in Minnesota. She felt that she would be the right pick, and when they talked, that was confirmed. Trisha just seemed like the perfect choice.

Trisha and husband Mason seemed ready for the undertaking. So when the time came, Sarah flew to Minneapolis to transfer an embryo. The entrepreneuse was just amazed that someone would do this for her. They held hands as the transfer went ahead in December 2019 and more than a few tears were shed.

All went well, and the wait was then on to see whether the embryo had taken. Sarah told Marie Claire that she’d said to her surrogate, “Trisha, I hope you know, whatever happens, it’s going to be okay.” Even so, she was stunned when she got a call telling her the attempted pregnancy had failed.

You might think that at this point Sarah would have been emotionally destroyed by this latest setback. Yet after so many false starts, she had already steeled herself for more disappointment. Mind you, she didn’t know how much more she could take, at least financially. The couple had spent nearly their whole savings on the pursuit of a baby.

But Sarah wasn’t completely ready to give up. By her own account, it had been in excess of a year since she’d quit the IVF. Now she asked for Lovenox, a drug that had previously brought success for a friend. Her doctor was a bit skeptical, but she was willing to give it a shot, so Sarah started on the latest round of treatment.

It was December 2019 when Sarah underwent another transfer, hoping against hope to avoid yet another miscarriage. Given the small chance of success, she had decided to pair up with her choice of surrogate again. And this time, Trisha had asked to use two embryos. Reassured by medics that because the embryos were not “high quality”, and twins were consequently unlikely, Sarah okayed Trisha’s double transfer in the new year.

Well, as luck would have it, this time Trisha’s transfer took. And not only that, but it looked very much like twins. Six weeks after the procedure Trisha went for a scan as planned, and her doctor listened out for a heartbeat. There were indeed two! After all this time, soon Sarah would likely have not just one baby, but two. She was over the moon. And maybe, just maybe, a third child was on the cards — because Sarah had fallen pregnant too.

Busy with a viral advertising campaign, Sarah hid her own pregnancy. After all, she knew she was no safer than before from falling prey to yet another miscarriage. But she was able to comfort herself with the knowledge that Trisha was pregnant with her fetuses, and maybe at least one would remain viable until birth.

Trisha had known Sarah was pregnant since before her second cycle. Sarah had wanted to be clear about it because initially Trisha had been supposed to be helping a couple who couldn’t have a baby themselves. But the news didn’t put her off the surrogacy. Far from it: rather, she was just delighted for Sarah.

In fact, a true friendship grew between Sarah and Trisha. Because of the pandemic, Sarah could not attend appointments, and their relationship had to be cemented via FaceTime. Yet they still became best buddies, and Sarah was able to bond with Trisha’s own twin children as well as attend all the doctor visits remotely.

Amazingly, Sarah’s own pregnancy continued to progress. Once she had passed 30 weeks, she started to believe that this time, there might actually be a baby at the end of it all. And at 39 weeks, after an emergency cesarean — necessary because the cord was snagged — there was! Her son Kento entered the world in August 2020: a bouncing 8-pounder.

Six weeks later, Sarah traveled to Minneapolis. A week later Trisha, too, had to have a cesarean after the twins refused to make their entrance naturally. Still, out they came, and Sarah welcomed Theo and Astrid, both about 6 pounds. She later told Marie Claire it was “one of the most surreal experiences of my life — watching your babies be born out of someone else’s body.”

What amazed Sarah was the lengths to which Trisha had been willing to go for her. She’d had a C-section, a serious surgical procedure. Sarah described her own cesarean as “the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” The whole experience had involved a lot more blood than she had expected, but the outcome was nothing but good.

Sarah’s fertility journey was finally at an end, and in a way that she could never have imagined. And people around her were likely stunned too, especially since she’d kept it all on the down low. There had been no posts on Instagram and no pictures of the baby bumps, neither hers nor Trisha’s.

Explaining how it felt, Sarah explained that she had shifted her life wholesale to accommodate her newcomers. She had really loved her old life, and that was one of the things that had made the infertility treatment difficult. She’d had to be committed again and again to a difficult physical, emotional, and financial journey — even though she’d been quite content before it.

Now Sarah has what she calls “triblings” because they’re kind of triplets and kind of siblings. She knew she’d face plenty of questions about how the three infants were related to one another. And she wanted to avoid just saying that they were triplets, because that would diminish Trisha’s gift to her and Chris.

Sarah’s maternity leave came to an end with the twins only six weeks old — but she insisted she was happy to get back to work. She was delighted to do it, she told Marie Claire. She said, “I was like, ‘Oh my God, I feel like myself again.’ But they are just pure joy. I don’t know how else to describe it.”