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Ons Verhaal
Ons Verhaal
Ons verhaal
Our Story
My name is Rick, a 41-year-old widower with, let’s say, a very special wish to have a child.
My dog Jimi and I live together in Rotterdam. I am co-owner of an import/export company in the DIY market. In my free time I mainly keep busy with sports (basketball) and long walks with my dog. I consider myself fortunate to have a large group of very close friends and a loving family. What follows is my (our) story, which I want to share with you—however difficult that may be.
To lose both your love and your life, and what remains is hope for a miracle…
That moment in your life when everything is going better than ever. You are 35 years old. Happy in love, surrounded by a wonderful social circle of friends and family. You’ve just started a new job that suits you perfectly. A beautiful holiday in southern Italy is about to begin. Then the phone rings. Breast cancer, triple negative.
This happened to my wife. In the prime of her life. My wife and I are high-school sweethearts. I am still counting, and at this moment we have been connected for 24 years. We grew up together and were fortunate enough to make beautiful trips. We started a business together. Truly privileged to be able to build an incredibly happy life of our own without real problems.
My wife and I always shared the conviction that the foundation for wanting children had to be more than solid. That meant the complete picture: peace, stability, love, and financial security as well. It remains heartbreakingly cruel to me that we thought we had our life in order and decided to try to fulfill our wish during that holiday in Italy. A phone call, and the world stopped turning.
My wife (Kelly), the fighter she was, took on the battle with everything she had. But not before putting herself second for our wish to have children. As you may know, chemotherapy can cause irreversible damage to the female reproductive organs. My wife therefore chose, before starting her own curative treatment, to undergo an egg preservation process.
I think this process is familiar to most people, so I won’t go into further detail. The result was three eggs that were successfully frozen—at the time still with the hope that we would never need them. After this process, my incredible powerhouse of a woman could begin her grueling fight. Even now, tears roll down my cheeks when I think back to everything she had to endure. I am so proud of how she faced everything head-on time and again and fought back. It all seemed to have been successful. She was declared cancer-free and discharged from the hospital.
Until, less than a year later, the ground was truly pulled out from under her feet—and mine. The cancer was back. With this variant (triple negative), we knew that if it returned, it would literally mean a death sentence. Palliative instead of curative. In December 2023, Kelly was torn from our lives by this horrific disease. My crazy one, my sweetheart, my beauty. Everything I loved in this earthly existence. And so I began this story: what remains is hope for a miracle…
I am so proud of my wife that even in the palliative phase she wanted to discuss everything with me, with such strength. We also talked about our wish to have children. My wife told me how much pain it caused her that she could not give me fatherhood. Heartbreaking to feel and hear this.
I heard her, and I started to think. Perhaps I might be able to adopt her eggs.
I shared this idea with my wife, and she was immediately overcome with emotion—she too thought it was a very beautiful idea. From there, we entered the process together with the hospital to make the adoption possible and thus keep our wish for a child alive.
“Hope keeps you alive” is a well-known expression. I think it is very applicable to my situation.
I am sharing my vulnerable story in exchange for any information that might be helpful, or perhaps simply a good conversation. I hold on to hope. My wife and I still have a very small chance of fulfilling our wish to have a child, through a surrogacy process. Hoping for a miracle.
Thank you for reading our story.
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