When Ellen Weir Casey earned an English degree from Colorado College in 1971, she knew she wanted to teach young children whose innocence and possibility had always touched her.<\/p>\n
Eight years later, she found herself consumed by another desire, one that would ultimately redeem a devastating mistake and fulfill the most cherished potential of her own life: having a baby.<\/p>\n
Her determination to achieve that dream made Casey the mother of Colorado\u2019s first test-tube baby, the end of a harrowing years-long odyssey she recounts in a new memoir, \u201cUnstoppable: Forging the Path to Motherhood in the Early Days of IVF.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cYoung women today assume in vitro (fertilization) is always an option,\u201d says Casey, who lives in Colorado Springs. \u201cBut it wasn\u2019t back then. There\u2019s not a lot out there about the history of early infertility treatments, especially about the early patient\u2019s experience. Young women need to know about the strong women who went before them, who opened the doors for them.\u201d<\/p>\n
Casey\u2019s saga began in 1974. Seeking an alternative to the birth control pill and trusting her doctor, she agreed to an experimental IUD.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs smart and educated as I was, I still had the mindset of believing what a man in authority told me,\u201d says Casey, then a graduate student at CC. Two months after the device was inserted, she sought emergency help for a high fever, cramps, and a raging infection that occluded her fallopian tubes. The IUD was removed, but the damage was done. Casey learned she was infertile five years later, as a newlywed unable to get pregnant.<\/p>\n
She blamed herself.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was so important for me to be a mother,\u201d she recalls. \u201cAnd I felt like I personally had ruined my own chance to have what I wanted by taking this IUD without researching it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Research would consume much of the next few years. Casey became an expert in emerging reproductive technologies, poring over microfiche, reading medical journals, and logging the countless hours necessary to educate herself in the pre-Internet age.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy research skills definitely were excellent because of CC professors having such absolutely high standards,\u201d Casey says. \u201cCC taught me the importance of a primary source \u2026 to always find excellence, to find the best thinker, the most innovative thinker.\u201d<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t the first time she had benefited from the college. CC helped pay her senior year tuition after her parents divorced, leaving her suddenly cash-poor. A few years later, CC allowed Casey, who already was a working teacher, to earn a Master of Arts in Teaching by enrolling in summer liberal arts institutes without the usual additional coursework. She graduated with her MAT in 1977.<\/p>\n
Casey\u2019s dogged research on infertility generated early possibilities, but each ended in heartbreak. In 1979, pioneering microsurgery opened her left fallopian tube, which allowed her to conceive. But it also caused scarring, which resulted in an ectopic pregnancy that might have killed her had she not recognized the symptoms and had an emergency operation.<\/p>\n
In 1980, Casey had laser surgery, also new at the time, to open her remaining fallopian tube \u2014 only to suffer another life-threatening complication in the form of a rapidly growing cyst six weeks later. Another emergency surgery removed the cyst and the tube \u2014 along with any chance of a natural pregnancy.<\/p>\n
There also were failed attempts to adopt before Casey \u2014 truly unstoppable \u2014 turned to the nascent technology of IVF, which involves removing eggs from a woman\u2019s ovaries, fertilizing them with sperm in a Petri dish, and then transferring the embryos into the woman\u2019s uterus.<\/p>\n
\u201cMy odds were 9% that this would work, that I would get pregnant and have a live birth,\u201d Casey says. \u201cIt was experimental; they were still trying to figure it out.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Casey\u2019s last shot turned out to be her best. In 1983, she welcomed daughter Elizabeth, Colorado\u2019s first test-tube baby. Thirty-five years later, in 2018, Casey became a grandmother to Bennett \u2014 an extension of a dream deferred but never relinquished.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Ellen Weir Casey \u201971, MAT \u201977 reflects on her odyssey through infertility, the earliest days of in vitro fertilization, and giving birth to her daughter, Colorado\u2019s first \u201ctest-tube baby.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1496,"featured_media":17791,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[123,26],"class_list":["post-17868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-spring-22","tag-because-of-cc","tag-features"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/files\/2022\/05\/26_AP3A8296-e1651852264198.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1496"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17868"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17919,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17868\/revisions\/17919"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.coloradocollege.edu\/bulletin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}