Photos of ESPN SportsCenter anchor Nicole Briscoe’s family look like a dream life, but infertility and the isolation and shame it causes are an all-too-common nightmare. Nicole and her husband, professional race-car driver Ryan Briscoe, worked for 10 years to make their picture-perfect family. The end result was two beautiful little girls. The path to that point involved seemingly endless cycles of hormones, needles, IVF treatments, never being diagnosed with a disease that can directly impact fertility despite being seen by countless fertility doctors and miscarriages so numerous you lose track of exactly how many there were.
Now, only two months removed from a hysterectomy, Nicole talks about it all – the complicated and conflicting emotions, the guilt, the anger, the shame, the isolation, the resulting grief from 10 years of thinking constantly about getting pregnant and staying pregnant and losing pregnancies – in an effort to help other women going through the same thing know that they are not alone.