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Loreauville couple shares fertility struggle at reunion with doctors

Posted at 7:48 PM, Oct 14, 2018
and last updated 2018-10-15 01:11:13-04

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 12 percent of women have difficulty getting pregnant or carrying to term.

Hundreds of those women are right here in Acadiana, but thanks to a Lafayette fertility clinic, some of them are now celebrating their own children.

“It was a very long road. A lot of ups and downs with that but it’s like once you have her, I forgot all about it,” Carrie Pattillo said

For seven years, Carrie and Cody Pattillo tried to have a child of their own.

“The first IVF was rough when it didn’t work, you know. She took it really hard but she didn’t give up,” Carrie’s husband Cody said.

After a miscarriage and many false hopes, the Loreauville couple finally had their miracle baby.

“This is Hazel Kate Pattillo. She’s a little firecracker,” Carrie said, holding up her little one.  “It’s very surreal. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t look at her and cry and say ‘I cannot believe we have her.'”

1 in 8 couples have trouble getting pregnant or sustaining a pregnancy. Through Fertility Answers, the Pattillo’s learned their journey was more common than they thought.

“So that’s a really large number. Very few diseases affect such a large part of our population and the one thing about it is that people don’t talk about it that much… I mean if you have an illness, a lung illness or a kidney disease, you seldom blame yourself, but a lot of these families, husbands and wives, they look internally and blame themselves,” explained Dr. John Stormant, Medical Director at Fertility Answers.

On Sunday at Zoosiana, the Pattillo family met dozens of other couples who shared the same struggle. They also reunited with the doctors who helped them become parents.

“Every day I would just say like what if we try again, what if we do it one more time. Just never give up. You never know when that opportunity will come,” Carrie said.

“Until you see everybody over here, you never really have any idea how big a scope it is of people that have trouble out there,” Cody added.