The Will Surfaced -- The Way Seized

"Nothing was going to stop me from furthering my education now. And so I thought, 'Well, if I could get a career, I could get married and put my husband through school and have a family'. That's what I wanted -- that's what I was raised to want my entire life, and now that I knew I could have that, I had all the drive in the world to make it happen."
"I had really high expectations [that I would get pregnant quickly]. I had been able to make so many things happen so easily, once I got all my health problems out of the way."
Whitney Quinton, 25, Calgary

Parents to be: The Quintons battled infertility for four years but finally, last November, a pregnancy test came back positive 

At age fifteen the young woman experienced seizures caused by a brain tumour. Doctors informed her family that their daughter would be disabled for the rest of her life. After six years had passed she was herself informed that her hormone levels were similar to those of a menopausal woman. Her aspirations to bear children would never be realized.

"I should be pregnant all the time, that's how good I feel. I feel like I can take on the world", she enthused in the first stages of a pregnancy. It's been quite a while since she began experiencing seizures in Grade 9, attending school in Cardston, Alberta, a community of about four thousand people, north of the Montana border. She was having a few seizures daily, causing her to miss a third of her school year.

And when a Calgary neurologist explained that brain surgery meant to put a halt to the seizures would be "experimental and might do nothing", she was devastated. Her dreams of graduating, of driving a car, of getting married or having children quelled in a disappointment that was crushing. "I bawled. [But then] I'm like, 'Well, I don't plan on having that happen'."

Another neurologist in Alberta discovered the presence of a benign tumour in her right temporal lobe. Its presence had been affecting her memory and her personality. This surgeon assured her that with its removal she could expect to lead a normal life. Post-surgery, she was informed, would mean a month's hospital stay for recovery. In fact, she was out of hospital in five days.

And then she met a young man who just happened to be from her hometown of Cardston, a Mormon-settled community. They courted for six months and married the Christmas of the summer they first met. She began work as a dental assistant and was able to put her husband through school as a chartered accountant. A year of marriage produced no pregnancy.

The next year she began experiencing painful abdominal cramps that required prescription medications. Her doctor informed her at that point when she was 23, that she should accustom herself to the realization that she was infertile, and in vitro fertilization would not work for her. Then came a second opinion and it was "just like my brain surgery all over again; two very different diagnoses."

For a Montreal gynaecologist had diagnosed her with the condition of endometriosis where tissue that is meant to grow within the uterus grows outside it. And it was removed. Then two months later a pregnancy test showed positive. Ms. Quinton and her husband Brett were in a positive state of exaltation over the news and posted a video to YouTube. News outlets picked it up as a social 'good news' story for their readers.

"When you go through hard things in life, God won't give you anything you can't handle", she now says with confidence. Certainly there has been pain and fear in her life, but fortunate serendipity solved much of that for her and so she is entitled to attribute her good fortune in the outcome of her life trajectory at her tender age to a heavenly spirit.

Big surprise: Whitney Quinton from Alberta, Calgary, filmed the moment she and her husband Brett told relatives their pregnancy news over Christmas