Actress Brittany Daniel was diagnosed with stage IV non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2011 at the age of 35. She underwent chemotherapy and has been cancer-free ever since, but shortly after her battle, she learned from her fertility doctor that becoming a mother would be a near-impossible battle.
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Brittany worked with an in vitro fertilization process doctor to go through two egg retrieval cycles, but she was told chemo had caused too much damage to her ovaries and egg reserve, and things were looking bleak. That is, until she informed them about her identical twin sister.
“He’s like, ‘What are we doing here? You can’t get any closer. You guys have the exact same DNA. Why don’t we ask your sister to see if she’d be open to sharing her eggs with you?’,” she says. “I reached out to Cynthia. She knew about the process I was going through and trying to retrieve eggs, and I brought it up to her and asked her if she would be open to sharing her eggs with me.”
Initially, Cynthia wasn’t sure if would even be possible as the two were in their late thirties, but she was willing do whatever it took to help make her sister’s dream come true.
“It just kind of stopped me in my tracks, because I was like, this is why my sister and I were brought together,” Cynthia says. “Not only just to support each other and love on each other… I know she would’ve done the same thing for me.”
A doctor confirmed that, while Brittany’s egg reserve was depleted, Cynthia’s was as healthy as “a 25-year-old’s,” news that left Brittany with mixed feelings.
“This is amazing news, because at the time we were 39, and he said she had an amazing chance of retrieving tons of eggs,” Brittany recalls. “But then, at the same time, I have to be totally honest, I had this pain in my heart, because I was like, I have to fully let this go for myself. But, of course, I found my way to pure joy and just being super grateful.”
Stephanie Rausser
At the time that Brittany and Cynthia were looking into freezing Cynthia’s eggs, Brittany was single, but six months later, she met her future husband, broker associate Adam Touni, and she immediately told him about her plans.
“I was like, ‘Oh yeah, I’m forty. I want a family. And if we were to start a family, we’d be using my twin sister’s eggs’,” she thinks back. “I dropped all this knowledge on him within the first couple hours of meeting him, and he was like, ‘Okay’.” The pair married in 2017 and then started the IVF process of doing the embryo transfer with Cynthia’s egg.
Brittany Daniel and Adam Touni
Unfortunately, after three failed attempts, Brittany began to lose hope for the family she envisioned. Her fertility doctor suggested using a surrogate, again using Cynthia’s donated egg, and that proved successful.Finally, on Oct. 24, 2021, the pair welcomed their daughter Hope.
“We were all in the delivery room together and got to witness this powerhouse of a woman,” Brittany says of her surrogate. “We were in total awe of her.”
Brittany’s emotional reaction to the situation surprised even her. “I just started scream-crying in the delivery room,” she says. “Everybody started crying: all the nurses, the doctors, because they knew what I had been through and just the pure joy that she was in our arms.”
“My friends reach out and are like, ‘Are you dying? Are you sleep deprived?’ Yeah, I’m tired, but I’m so energized too,” she says. “I’m just so happy. When you’ve worked this hard, I mean, it’s almost 10 years in the making. It’s just been amazing.”
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source: people.com
