Fertility Clinics' Epic Fail Means More Heartbreak for Childless Women

In case you haven't been to my town in a while, Cleveland rocks and it's still rising. Even so, the appearance of major network journalists is still a fairly big deal. This week, NBC News' Kate Snow was here because a malfunction at one of the city's major hospital systems may have damaged thousands of embryos and eggs frozen in liquid nitrogen.

Those eggs belong to thousands of women relying on them to make dreams of pregnancy come true. For many, they represent the only way that conception will ever happen. One woman called the incident her "worst nightmare".

I can only imagine. As I watched interviews and read news coverage, I remember thinking, 'How terrible!"

And then, it happened again.

A San Francisco fertility clinic reported that its cyro-storage laboratory "lost liquid nitrogen for a brief period of time" on Sunday, March 4, 2018. Weirdly enough, it happened the same weekend of the Cleveland center's failure. An awful coincidence, though fewer than 500 eggs and embryos are reported to be at risk.

As of this writing, the Cleveland facility is under investigation by two accreditation organizations and the Ohio Department of Health.

Meanwhile, patients wait to find out if they should be relieved or devastated and many are sharing their stress on Facebook. In Cleveland, Marc Ellis, wrote, "my wife has eggs at that hospital...shes going crazy crying all morning...I don't know what to do..."

If you never hoped for kids, it may be hard to relate to fertility clinics at all. But, everybody knows what it feels like to have a dream crushed through no fault of your own.