Abby Mercado

See how Abby and her business partner Kristyn are changing the fertility game on instagram @fertility.rescripted.

Five sentences about me…

A Texas native, I currently live in Denver with my husband, Sean, my four-year-old twins, Max and Annie, and my giant orange Maine Coon cats, Oliver and Jones (yes, we like to do things in twos).

I’ve lived in Dallas, Nashville, and New York, but Denver is my forever home! Being outdoors fuels my soul, and Colorado is the perfect place to do just that. I’ve always been very career-driven, but co-founding Rescripted has added an important sense of purpose to that career-drive. I’ve also worked in venture capital and investment banking, but adding value in startups is where I’ve always been happiest.

Outside of spending time with my little family, I love skiing, an outdoor summer concert (this might be polarizing, but preferably country music; I did go to college in Music City USA!), reading (fiction on my Kindle; non-fiction on Audible while doing stuff around the house), consuming podcasts, and hanging with my girlfriends.

I am a feminist through and through (my mom did burn her bra in the 70s, after all!), and I really enjoy supporting fellow female founders as they also walk the startup journey.

Five sentences about what I've endured in the fertility realm...

Sean and I went through IVF in 2018 to conceive Max and Annie. We “pulled the goalie” on a trip to Spain in 2017, thinking, like many, that we would get pregnant the first time we tried. Boy, were we wrong…!

Before starting treatment, the next nine months were utter torture. Between my friend group, social media, and even in the damn grocery store, I felt like the only person who wasn’t pregnant. It seemed like everywhere I went, another annoyingly happy pregnant belly was staring me in the face.

Our diagnosis was – and still is – male factor infertility. Sean’s sperm, just like him, are very social, enjoying circling around and around and never moving forward to find my egg. He also has poor morphology. We did an IUI in April 2018 that failed famously; the sperm washing went so poorly that we almost didn’t go through with the procedure. In May 2018, after taking out a second mortgage to move forward with IVF, we scheduled a retrieval. I became pregnant naturally mid-cycle, miraculously, as we had been told we had a less than 1% chance of getting pregnant the old-fashioned way. However, because I was taking Cetrotide, I devastatingly miscarried at six weeks.

We ended up retrieving a couple months later, and we got to four healthy embryos. After a trip to France in August that our REI forced us to go on, we transferred the embryos that grew into our twinsies.

One thing I wish I knew going into my fertility journey...

Even though it seemed like we were the only couple in the world who couldn’t get pregnant naturally, we were absolutely, 100% not alone. 1 in 5 people in the US have infertility. We still have so far to go in terms of shattering the stigma and normalizing the conversation around infertility, but we’re getting there!

One thing about me that is forever changed because of my fertility journey...

I haven’t historically been a patient person, but my infertility journey made me increasingly so. I was far from perfect at doing this, but I learned how to bide my time doing things that filled my cup while I waited for the babies.

One funny moment or anecdote from my fertility journey...

I said something VERY embarrassing to my husband in front of my entire fertility care team when I was coming to after my retrieval. I’ll just leave it at that…

One product, practice, or ritual I adopted during my fertility journey, which I have/have not kept a part of my life...

Saying no! Between IUI and IVF, I distinctly remember telling a friend of mine that I wish she wouldn’t talk about her pregnancy so much to me because of what I was going through. This snowballed into saying no to baby showers. Even on the “other side” of infertility, saying no is something that I constantly put into practice to take care of my mental health.