Folks assumed a girl in a wheelchair couldn't get pregnant — but it surely was her husband who was infertile
- Paralympian Mallory Weggemann and her able-bodied husband, Jay Snyder, had bother conceiving.
- Weggemann, who’s paralyzed, confronted stigma round parenting. However it was her husband that was infertile.
- The couple shared their IVF journey on the Pregnantish podcast.
At age 18, Mallory Weggemann went to the hospital to obtain an epidural injection for again ache — and left six weeks later paralyzed from the procedure-gone-wrong.
“There have been so many questions within the weeks and months and, frankly, years to observe: What does a future appear like for me by way of a profession, by way of persevering with my schooling, by way of relationships, a household?” Weggemann, now a Paralympic swimmer, mentioned on an April episode of the Pregnantish podcast.
Particularly, Weggemann, who’s used a wheelchair within the 15 years since, frightened that conceiving and delivering organic youngsters can be a problem. She’d internalized a number of the social stigma towards mother and father with disabilities.
“It not solely comes right down to are you able to bodily bear youngsters, get pregnant, carry a being pregnant, and ship a baby, however there’s nonetheless a lot of society that views it as, ‘What kind of mom might you be in that course of?'” Weggemann informed podcast host Andrea Syrtash. “And so I feel that that was all the time a burden and a hurdle that I carried.”
However after assembly her husband, Jay Snyder, in 2011, Weggemann was able to confront her issues. The couple visited medical doctors and realized Weggemann’s paralysis would not straight have an effect on her fertility — but it surely was her husband who had infertility
“We’ll always remember: We had been on a airplane in Salt Lake Metropolis flying to an occasion and bought the take a look at outcomes,” Snyder mentioned on the podcast. “And we checked out these outcomes, and we stared at them, stared at one another, and simply broke.”
Snyder had azoospermia, or no sperm in his semen, possible associated to a surgical procedure he had undergone when he was 13. “We grieved, and we put a little bit of a pin in it,” Weggemann mentioned.
Each she and Snyder, who works in sports activities media, went to the 2020 Paralympic Video games in Tokyo, which ended up being held in 2021 because of the pandemic. Weggemann earned two gold and one silver medal.
“In going into Tokyo, our motto was ‘shield the dream,'” Weggemann mentioned. “We actually leaned into saying, ‘Tokyo is a journey that we’re doing as a household. And whereas Little One will not be bodily in existence but, Little One is part of each single determination that we’re making proper now, and they’re part of this journey.'”
After the Video games, Weggemann and Snyder had been able to pursue parenthood. Snyder underwent an invasive sperm-retrieval surgical procedure with a 40% success fee. It labored.
In all, Weggemann underwent 18 months of IVF, together with 707 injections, two ovarian stimulation cycles, two egg retrievals, two months of hormone remedy for suspected endometriosis, and two embryo transfers, per Folks, earlier than turning into pregnant.
Weggemann delivered their daughter, Charlotte, in March 2023.
She informed Syrtash, who she spoke to earlier than the start, that the expertise has emphasised that two seemingly competing truths can exist directly.
“It is OK to have adversity with pleasure — it doesn’t suggest you are ungrateful. And it is OK to search out pleasure within the grief, it doesn’t suggest that you simply’re in denial,” she mentioned.
