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Tinina Q. Cade Foundation

by | Fertility Blog

Pathways to Parenthood

When I was 18 years old, during the weekend of my college orientation, I was rushed to the hospital with severe cramping and bleeding.  Following emergency exploratory surgery, I learned that I had severe endometriosis, a condition that would make it very difficult for me to conceive children.  I was young and unmarried; at the time, I didn’t want to be married. While this news disappointed me, I didn’t appreciate the magnitude of that diagnosis then.

Over the next six years,  I underwent several rounds of medical treatment and surgery to provide relief from the incapacitating pain I experienced each month during my menses. I believed this surgery would preserve my ability to birth a child when I was ready. Like most young people, I figured that things would just work out.  I thought that once I was married, professionally established, financially secure, and ready to conceive, I would do so easily.  I truly thought that I would have an uncomplicated pregnancy, a natural birth, and a seamless transition from great physician and doting wife to super mom.  Life was much more interesting and a lot harder than my fantasy.

Here’s what actually happened.  After graduating from the University of Richmond, I attended the University of Maryland School of Medicine where I graduated with honors.  I married my husband during my third year of medical school. While I pursued a residency in general preventive medicine, we tried to conceive the old fashioned way. That’s when my “pathway to parenthood” fantasy broke under the strain of reality.  While I excelled professionally,  I was physically and emotionally exhausted and devastated that I could not conceive.

Meanwhile, our family members and acquaintances conceived without difficulty, and some even complained about how easily and often they got pregnant. I wept.  I pleaded with God. I ranted to my husband. I raged at my body. Then I wept again. Ultimately, my husband and I struggled through five years of infertility, which included countless tears, innumerable prayers, many fertility treatment cycles, financial brokenness, physical hurt, and emotional distress.

After unsuccessful rounds of very expensive fertility treatment, we were counseled to consider adoption or a gestational carrier to have children.  I will be forever grateful that we had insurance to cover a portion of the cost of fertility treatments and for our doctor, who told us the painful truth that we needed to stop trying fertility treatments because they were not working, would not work, and that we should save our money.  But he didn’t say that we couldn’t be parents. Instead, he offered another path.

My parents, two of the few people who actually knew about our private struggle, asked if my mom, a 54 year old post-menopausal college administrator, could carry our baby. We politely declined the invitation.  Thankfully, my parents were persistent and had faith that it was possible for her to carry our child even when my husband and I didn’t.  After much discussion, prayer, and months of testing, we moved forward, and my mom became my gestational carrier, which meant that my eggs, fertilized with my husband’s sperm, were placed in my mother’s uterus.  Three of our fertilized embryos were placed into my mother’s womb with the hope that one would develop.

Much to our surprise, all three embryos thrived. Eight months later, my mom delivered our healthy, perfect triplets – yes triplets! Many of our friends first heard about our infertility, our pregnancy, and the fact that my mother carried our babies when they saw it on the news. Then some friends, actually many friends, came forward to privately share that they also struggled with infertility.  Ultimately, we were blessed with our miracle babies but in a very non-traditional way.

About a year after our kids were born, we started the Tinina Q. Cade Foundation, a non-profit organization named in honor of my mother, with the goal of providing other families with the support and love that she and my dad had given us to help build our family.  We hoped to ultimately provide one $10,000 grant to a family in order to help with the cost of adoption or fertility treatment and to increase awareness and access to information about overcoming infertility.  We worked on the foundation in our very limited free time and, with the support of family and friends, held a fundraiser to seed the grant.

That whisper of a dream has grown with the support of fantastic people and organizations to the point where the Tinina Q. Cade Foundation is now a national non profit that has provided 58 families with grants of up to $10,000 and thousands with information about different ways to become parents and support OVERCOMING infertility.


Author’s Note: This is a section of a larger piece published at my undergraduate institution the University of Richmond, for the WILL (Women In Leadership Learning program).

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