Susie, 50, and Tony, 61, Troxler got married 13 years ago and when they first began to struggle with naturally conceiving, they weren’t aware of the options that existed.

“When we got married, we just assumed we’d get pregnant, and then it didn’t happen,” Susie said to Good Morning America. “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.”

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says that for healthy couples in their 20s and early 30s, around one in four women will get pregnant in any single menstrual cycle. Those chances become less by age 40 where around one in 10 women will get pregnant per menstrual cycle.

ACOG says that a man’s fertility also declines with age though it’s not as predictable.

She said it was not until three years ago when a new OBGYN, Dr. Carolyn Harraway-Smith Cone Health Women’s Hospital asked — for the first time — if she had 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’,” Susie told GMA.

Dr. Smith then referred Susie to a reproductive endocrinologist who discovered she had fibroids that would need to be surgically removed. Despite their removal, she was told that she and her husband would still not be able to get pregnant naturally, GMA reported, because of her age and because of health complications on her husband’s side.

After a few rounds of IVF, which costs thousands of dollars per treatment, the couple did not produce a viable embryo so they decided to try egg donation.

Egg donation can happen when a donor has their eggs medically removed from their ovaries. According to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, “once the eggs are removed, they are evaluated by an embryologist. Then sperm from the male partner or a sperm bank is placed around or injected into each egg.”

Though their first embryo transfer did not take, in February of 2021 they decided to try again with their last viable frozen embryo.

On September 29, 2021 the Troxler’s welcomed Lily Antonia Troxler after a pregnancy Susie called “pretty uneventful.”

“…We look at it as this is exactly how it was meant to be,” Susie told GMA. “She’s our miracle baby.”

Tony says he finds himself just staring at his new baby girl.

He told GMA, “Before she was born, she had me wrapped around her pinky finger.”

Newsweek contacted Cone Health but they did not respond in time for publication.