A woman welcomed a child for the first time at the age of 50 after years of battling infertility.
Susie Troxler, a psychologist in High Point, North Carolina, gave birth to their daughter, Lily Antonia Troxler, on Sept. 29, 2021, after over 10 years of trying to get pregnant.
She and her husband, Tony Troxler, 61, will celebrate their first Thanksgiving this year as parents.
“It’s really, really, really surreal,” Susie said of welcoming a daughter at age 50. “I’d been unmarried, I’d been a wife and now the idea of being a mommy, it still hasn’t sunk in I don’t think.”
The Troxlers had tried to have a baby since marrying 13 years ago, but were never able to naturally conceive.
Susie Troxler said that for both she and her husband, seeking fertility help was not something they considered, simply because they did not know what options existed.
She said: “When we got married, we just assumed we’d get pregnant, and then it didn’t happen.
“But we’re both very old-school, and when we grew up, nobody even talked about or discussed IVF [in-vitro fertilization]. It wasn’t even a thing.”
That changed around three years ago, when Susie Troxler went in for her annual exam with her new OBGYN at Cone Health, a North Carolina-based health care network where Tony had recently been hired in the security department.
Susie Troxler recalled: “At the end of the appointment, she asked me a question nobody else had ever asked me: ‘Is there anything else, any concerns or questions?
“Because she asked it, I mentioned that we hadn’t gotten pregnant, and she said, ‘OK, we can work on that.'”
