It's a surprisingly little known fact: 15% of couples are infertile, and 25-40% of detected pregnancies are miscarried. But no one talks about these things. Until now. In this groundbreaking for its time (2013) TEDx talk, three-time cancer survivor Kara Fitzpatrick shares her story of love, loss, and the struggles that go along with trying to conceive a child. And how a positive attitude (and sometimes wildly inappropriate humor) got her through it all.

Through powerful storytelling, Kara shares her raw experiences with infertility and PCOS, the IVF process, grief, resilience, and how she processed the heartbreak of losing her uterus to cancer—and her chance to have her own biological children.

Turns out, trying to have kids is hard. For a lot of us. She’d like to hope it would suck a little less if we could just give ourselves permission to talk to each other about it.