BOWLING GREEN, Ohio — "It just takes a toll because every month you have a lot of hope that you're going to be pregnant and you're counting the days until you realize you're not pregnant," said Diana Rogers about her and her husband Jake's journey trying to have a baby.
Any couple who's experienced infertility can relate to the struggle and month after month of dashed hope.
"And then you see all of your friends getting pregnant," Diana said. "A lot of people with babies and it's like, 'Great, we are so happy for you.' But at the same time, it's like, 'This is hard. We want to have a family too.'"
The couple has a unique story. They met in Diana's native Guatemala and maintained a long distance relationship for a few years, then got married and settled in Jake's hometown of Bowling Green almost six years ago.
The past year has been tough, trying to get pregnant with no baby to show for it.
"I went to my doctor and she ran a lot of tests and then I was on medicine, like an aggressive fertility treatment, and that didn't work," Diana said.
Then one morning on his drive to work in Toledo, where Jake is a PE teacher at Lucas County Detention Center, he heard about a contest on iHeart Radio's Mojo in the Morning for a chance to win free In Vitro Fertilization.
"We just want to be parents to show a kid love and have so much joy that it brings to your life and we can bring to their life," Jake said he wrote in the entry.
Jake's words on the entry were enough to get into the top 20 out of 10,000 entrants, then to the top 10 where it was up to the public to vote for their favorite couple.
"We were on the radio listening and that's when Mojo said our names and it was just... we didn't know what to do," Diana said. "We were just in shock, like, 'Did it really happen? Are you sure?' And then we cried."
Diana and Jake won free IVF, with one embryo transfer. It's something that would have cost them about $15,000.
They thank everyone in northwest Ohio, many of them total strangers, for voting to give them this chance.
"[It's great] just to finally have the excitement and to be hopeful instead of always being let down every month," Jake said.