After heavy loss, journalist Darla Miles hasn’t given up on being a mother

Darla Miles is an Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter for WABC-TV in New York City. She knows what it takes to do her research, contact her sources, listen to people, and get to the bottom of the story, but when it comes to her own life, she doesn’t know. She admits that she has had many experiences.when infertility problems.

“I’m still amazed that I didn’t know about fertility treatments. I was amazed,” she told ESSENCE. “I listened to so many people’s fertility journeys. I really thought I was well equipped and armed.”

However, it fails to fully prepare her for the journey she will eventually take, and continues on her way.

Miles met her future husband in her 30s and married at 36. She found out before her big day that she was pregnant, which greatly affected her original plans. Nevertheless, her pregnancy was a blessing for her. However, it will be short term.

“I have rheumatoid arthritis, and one of the drugs used to treat rheumatoid arthritis is methotrexate, a chemotherapy drug that regulates white blood cell counts,” she says. Methotrexate is also a drug used to terminate an ectopic pregnancy. Miles hadn’t used hers in a while, but she returned before realizing she was pregnant.

“I was so upset,” she recalls. “I started spotting, went to the ER and lost that baby.”

But she was optimistic that it would happen again.The journalist and her husband got married and became pregnant for the second time. However, the pregnancy comes to an abrupt end.

“I was literally in the middle of a broadcast report and felt it pass,” she says. I had a miscarriage.”

With her second miscarriage, Miles began to feel insecure as she approached her 40s.

“I’m old, have an autoimmune disease, and have now had a miscarriage. My body knows to attack the developing embryo instantly,” she says. The windows I thought I had when I was 36 came up to me like a rocket because I was like, ‘Wait, I’ve had so much time.'”

Although conceiving wasn’t as easy as before, Miles and her husband successfully conceived for the third time. She was over 40 at the time, but she was doing well and she was overjoyed.

“It was my 41st birthday on November 23, 2013. My husband said, ‘Baby, what do you want for your birthday?’ I’m happy,” she recalls. “I literally have a husband. I did.”

They went to appointments and continued to feel happy to hear the baby’s heartbeat.

“I remember my husband being so devastated,” she recalls. “He said, ‘It’s an emergency. I really need to go to the office. I knew it wasn’t an emergency. I knew he needed to grieve alone, and I I allowed him to grieve.Such an American family.Some men want just that.And that’s what my husband wanted.And I felt so guilty that I could actually do it myself. I couldn’t even feel sorry for myself. I knew how much it hurt him, so I apologized.

Before Christmas that year, she went to the D&C procedure to remove the tissue from her pregnancy. Shortly thereafter, they would face another devastation. What seemed to start as her husband’s headache quickly turned into a medical emergency as she healed in her home and her husband was by his side.

“There was something dancing in his eyes, and it made me very alert,” she says. I called. They learned that he had had a stroke and had been paralyzed on the left side of his body for some time. , believed that it traveled to the lungs.

“He had trouble breathing, his heart stopped, and because of his debilitating condition, they were unable to revive him,” she says. happened.

Miles will find himself grappling with grief. Not only did she lose another pregnancy, she lost her husband too. her best friend. On top of that, she had lost his ability to have children. He didn’t save the specimen because they didn’t want to be a couple stuck in fertility treatments or “what if” if they couldn’t conceive.

Her plans changed completely and for a while she had no choice but to deal with it.From 2014 to 2020, time passed and she didn’t think much about having a family. Then something changed. She was told she will need a lumbar fusion surgery in 2020 and she won’t be able to try to conceive for a year. She felt robbed of something she had been inactive for quite some time. Miles wondered what was happening to her own egg. But she didn’t quite understand.

“I always wanted to have kids, adopt. It’s complicated,” she says. “What should I do? Should I wait for my husband? Go to the sperm bank? Do I go to the egg donor?”

After talking with my girlfriend, she was advised to try freezing eggs. The last time she thought about that route, she was about 41, and she found herself disappointed with her doctor at the time. She was told she was “too old” to be frozen even though she was still on her period.

“I was going to a top doctor, so I took it for granted,” she says. “It’s weird. I advocate every day at work. Everyone knows I’m a beast. And I’m the same beast with other health issues. I didn’t have that tenacity when dealing with fertility. It was a delicate subject.”

However, her friends advised her to get a second opinion. Hope returned when a woman she knew had her eggs frozen and was able to conceive at age 50, and Miles sought that second opinion before she knew it. As in, instead of telling her how unlikely it was to succeed, she was told, “It won’t hurt to try.”

She said this doctor at the New Hope Fertility Center in New York City was “wonderful,” and he’s not giving up, so she’s definitely not giving up.

“Now that we’re able to retrieve and save some eggs, the thing that bothers me is not to try. I’m just there,” she says. “So even if all this fails, I still have the peace of mind that I have followed all my options. That’s what I was told. So no is only the first answer, not the final answer.”

While there are questions that still need to be answered (for example, will she be able to get a surrogate?), she is optimistic as she is nearly 50 and continuing the egg freezing process.

“When my husband died, the most comforting words he said to me were, ‘You know? Sometimes life sucks. , accept that it doesn’t go your way.Don’t give up.Never surrender.”