When she was first diagnosed with stage 3 breast cancer at 24 years old, Aly Taylor’s dream of having children came crashing down around her.
She and her high school sweetheart, Josh, had been trying to get pregnant when doctors discovered her cancer.
After a double mastectomy and chemotherapy, doctors were certain that the radiation treatments would prevent Aly from ever conceiving a child.
They broke the news to the Taylors, who were devastated. But the couple took it as an opportunity to explore adoption. It led them to their daughter Genevieve, who they adopted in 2015.
When Genevieve was just nine months old, the Taylors got the surprise of a lifetime.
Though pregnancy was not an option, Aly began feeling nauseous. A week went by before she decided to rule the possibility out for good.
She dug up a pregnancy test they’d had in the house since before her cancer diagnosis, and learned that she was in fact—pregnant.
“We were told, medically, ‘You’re not going to get pregnant. It’s not gonna work,’” Josh says. “And so for us, it’s clearly a miracle.”
They were told there wasn’t even a “slim chance” of having a child.
Now, not only were they expecting a baby they were told would never come, but just one month into her pregnancy, the Taylors learned that Genevieve’s birth mother was pregnant again as well.
“She said, ‘Aly we’re not expecting you to adopt this baby because you’re pregnant,’ but immediately my heart was drawn to this baby,” Aly said.