Against All Odds

One doctor after another told Katya Pappalardo she’d never be able to fall pregnant. Her two “miracle babies” proved them wrong.

- Riëtte Grobler

“NEVER GIVE UP!” This is the message Katya Pappalardo, 44, from Johannesburg, wants to say to women struggling to fall pregnant. Becoming a mother wasn’t an easy journey for Katya, but today she’s the doting mom of four-year-old Samantha and baby Neve, who was born in March this year. “My primary school motto was ‘Yield Not’ and it has always been the way I’ve lived my life,” says Katya, who believes this approach remained her guiding light during years of struggling with infertility. As a former beauty queen and fitness model, Katya was the picture of health and fitness for most of her life. Nobody could have foreseen the struggles she would endure trying to fall pregnant.

DISCOURAGING NEWS

“When I got engaged in 2010, I knew I wanted to start a family right away,” Katya recalls. She was 36 at the time and decided to visit a fertility clinic to rule out any complications. “I knew all about declining fertility with age, and had suffered from endometriosis and fibroids (benign tumours in the uterus), which meant I had to start my fertility treatment with a laparoscopy to clear my uterus,” Katya says. “The doctor at the fertility clinic wanted us to try falling pregnant naturally for six months, but it didn’t work.”

In a misguided attempt to be funny, her doctor told her that her ovaries looked like “shrivelled prunes”.

“This is not something you want to hear when you’re desperate to become a mother,” Katya says. “The doctor also said that although I didn’t look my age, my eggs did. I have incredibly low Anti-Mullerian Hormone (AMH), which is the key reason why doctors said I’d never fall pregnant naturally.”