Years of painful procedures. Years of one lonely stripe on the test.
My first miscarriage came so early I barely had time to feel pregnant. I told myself, “That’s okay, it happens—at least I finally got that big, fat plus.” And I kept trying. Hormones, tests, more hormones… and I did it. I was pregnant. We even made it to 16 weeks.

I was a teacher then, and on September 1—amid the noise and joy of the first day of school—I felt something was wrong, even before I saw the blood. I ended the day in the ER. After the scan I asked, “Can we save the baby?” The doctor said, “There is no one to save,” and I was taken for a procedure under general anesthesia. It crushed me like a concrete block. I was afraid to try again. The divorce that followed felt inevitable.

I moved to Kyiv to rebuild my life. It took three years to find the courage to try once more. At the 12-week scan I was told I had placental hyperplasia and was advised to terminate; “you won’t make it to term.” I cried, I shouted, and I said no. I spent most of the pregnancy in hospital—risk of preterm birth at week 20, then again at week 30—until the ward felt like home.

Those months rewired me. When you’ve counted heartbeats on a monitor and watched hope rise and fall with lab numbers, you learn how precious each embryo is. You also learn the quiet ache of sitting with friends and their toddlers—smiling, nodding, and feeling a step outside their world.

Years later—before I even knew surrogacy existed—I was a successful translator. I wasn’t unhappy, but it felt like exchanging time for money while carrying other people’s impact. I kept asking: am I shaping the world, or just translating it? I wanted to look back and know I’d made a real difference, even a small one.

Then I saw an opening at a fertility clinic for an English-speaking assistant manager. It wasn’t the title; it was the purpose. Infertility wasn’t a word to me—it was a road I’d walked, one that had cost me a marriage and years of my life. I sent my CV, mentioned my time in the US, and was invited to interview right away. That’s when the ball started rolling.

I started as an English-speaking assistant, became a program coordinator, then a senior program coordinator, and eventually Head of the Client Department. I walked beside hundreds of intended parents—through middle-of-the-night calls, confusing lab results, embassy paperwork, losses, and births. I learned to translate complex protocols into plain words, to keep people steady when fear spiked, and to advocate when it mattered most.

In time, with the colleagues who had stood shoulder to shoulder with me for years—now faithful friends and trusted partners—we opened our own agency, Ave Fertility, built on shared values: transparency, dignity, and relentless care.

Today I use my story for someone else’s future. I translate medicine into human language, stand with intended parents in the “what now?” moments. We fight for families, through procedures, against disease, past unjust laws. If your path has been heavy, I see you. You don’t have to carry it alone.