She can't bring herself to do it. She counts to three several times, breathing deeply and looking for just the right spot to jab the needle into her thigh. But each time she gets to three, fear overcomes her and she pauses, a syringe full of the ovulation-inducing drug still in her hand. At first she laughs it off. After all, a grown woman should be able to give herself a shot. But then the laughter fades and she starts to feel very alone. Gary wouldn't have any problem giving her the injection, but he's working hours away in Iowa.

Gary gives Tracy a shot of fertility drugs, something she wasn't able to do herself when she was alone.

But not without Gary.

The first round of fertility shots will have to wait until he gets home.

Teenage obsession

As a teenager in high school, Tracy didn't doodle flowers or animals on her homework.

She wrote the names of the children she hoped to have one day.

When she and her cousins got together at family gatherings, Tracy was always the role model. The mother of the group.

If they played school, Tracy was invariably the teacher.

"I had six Cabbage Patch Kids, and I was way too old to admit playing with them," Tracy said.

It was her love of teaching children that brought her together with Gary Heilers, the man she'd marry years later.

Both Iowa natives were active in sports - Tracy was a Division I gymnast at the University of Iowa, while Gary was a runner at Loras College in Dubuque. They worked at a sports camp together in the summer of 1991, and there was an immediate attraction, Tracy said.

After dating for three years, they were married in the summer of 1994 in Cedar Rapids.

From the early stages of dating and eventually marriage, Tracy and Gary agreed that having a family was important to them. And if things went according to plan, three children would fulfill their vision of a perfect family unit. Like many couples, they decided to wait a few years before the first pregnancy. They spent time traveling, working and enjoying their young marriage. They rented an apartment in Carol Stream so Tracy could work at an engineering firm in Glendale Heights. Gary found a job teaching physical education at nearby Glenbard North High School. The kids, they imagined, would come later.

For Gary and Tracy, their dogs did not a family make.

Surrounded by kids

Gary is one of five children and a twin, to boot.

A big family was a source of comfort for him. Kids were also a constant part of his formative years.

When his sisters, the local baby sitters, couldn't be home to watch the neighborhood children, Gary often would take over.

His ability to work with kids grew as he began his career as a teacher and coach at Glenbard North.

The bond he has with his charges at school is evident in their interaction at practices, meets and even at team gatherings at the Heilers' home.

Every summer just as school is about to begin, Gary gathers his girls cross country team for a barbecue at his home.

Tracy didn't grow up in a large family, but that didn't mean the concept was any less important to her.

She always dreamed about starting a family and taking on the role of mother for real. As the younger of two children, she secretly hoped that her mother would have another child.

"I think I would have made a great older sister," she said.

False start

Two years after the couple exchanged vows, the time felt right to start a family. Tracy stopped taking birth control pills.

But a year later, they'd still had no luck conceiving a child.

As time went on and doubt began to worm its way into Tracy's mind, so did the un-comfortable thought of having to seek medical advice.

Gary and Tracy look for a doctor's name on a directory in a bloomingdale office for advice on invitro fertilization.

"Asking for help was something I didn't do," Tracy said. Even though Gary persuaded her to seek a doctor's help, Tracy still felt in her heart that she didn't want any. "For the same reason growing up as a kid I didn't want anyone's help tying my shoes," she said. "I should be able to do this (myself)." Tracy said she never gave up on the idea that she could have a child naturally, but Gary talked her into taking the leap of seeing a fertility specialist. "Gary helped me see that it might be something I'm not going to solve with my self-help books," she said. Gary suggested Tracy quit her new job as an engineer for the city of Geneva to focus her efforts on becoming pregnant.

Although she had pursued an engineering degree for years, having a child had become a bigger priority.

She took her husband up on his suggestion.

But those good intentions became a source of more stress. Tracy now treated getting pregnant as a job, and she wasn't succeeding.

Every time the couple came up with a new strategy for conceiving a child, they met with increasingly frustrating failures. Each experience added to the pressure to have a child, and it would eventually lead them to try just about anything to have a child of their own.

First steps

In June of 1998, the Heilers decided to further investigate the problem. First, Gary was tested. And when he checked out OK, they met with a physician at the Center for Human Reproduction in Hoffman Estates who prescribed some natural supplements to help jumpstart Tracy's reproductive system.

Over the course of the next two years, they began their search across the Northwest suburbs for help in fulfilling their dream of having a child. But by spring of 2000, unhappy with acting only on outward signs, they decided to try exploratory surgery to get a first-hand look at what was happening inside Tracy. What they discovered during a laparoscopy was advanced-stage endometriosis on one of Tracy's ovaries, a condition that could inhibit a pregnancy. Doctors zapped the offending tissue with a laser and ran dye through her fallopian tubes to ensure there were no more obstructions. Although the surgery left Tracy physically and emotionally exhausted, it was the first tangible source of hope for the couple that Tracy might someday become pregnant. It energized them to try again. Tracy took another step out of her comfort zone when she and Gary decided to try artificial insemination.

Dr. Jane Nanni operates on Tracy on June 12, 2000 at Valley Ambulatory Surgical Center in St. Charles to remove endometriosis from one of Tracy's ovaries.

But each menstruation brought with it the painful reminder that conceiving naturally was not working.

As if the stress of trying to conceive wasn't enough, an insurance mix-up meant they now had to deal with an onslaught of phone calls and bills.

"I was trying to decrease the stress in my life," she said, "and now I have to call the insurance agency every month."

The last straw, she said, was the day a bill collector showed up on their doorstep. She decided it was time for Gary to deal with the problem, since the insurance carrier through his job was covering them.

"I just can't do this anymore," she told him.

Balancing the charkas

Tracy had stepped out of her comfort zone to take the fertility shots, and that hadn't worked.

As months and years passed and Tracy's desperation grew, she sought less traditional help. She had practiced yoga in the past, but a new instructor had been mentioning a technique called reiki.

Reiki therapist Patricia Williams works to balance Tracy's energy centers during a session in Williams' Geneva home in October 2002.

A form of hands-on energy healing, it helps balance the energy fields in the body known as chakras, say practitioners. Because Tracy liked her yoga instructor and had entrusted her with stories of her problems getting pregnant, she was excited to try something new. In the fall of 2000 she began reiki sessions and always felt more energized afterward. She said her body felt more in balance and in tune for a pregnancy. But it didn't produce the result Tracy was hoping for.

Chiropractic

During the summer of 2001, she began seeking advice from a chiropractor, whom she had seen for lower back pain in the past.

He tested her saliva for hormone levels, told her the levels weren't high enough to facilitate a pregnancy and suggested she take hormone supplements: licorice root, progesterone, pregnenolone and DHEA, steroid hormones produced from cholesterol in the adrenal glands.

But the times of day she needed to administer the medications caused conflicts with her new work schedule teaching gymnastics to children.

And as with many other things she'd tried, she found it hard to continue the regimen when nobody could pinpoint what exactly was wrong.

Chinese medicine During February and March of 2002 she consulted with a Chinese medicine specialist in West Chicago, experimenting with acupuncture and various herbal supplements. Nothing worked. Every new avenue of hope Tracy found turned into a dead end. "I always left the doctor appointments with a sunken-heart feeling," she said. "The whole situation was so heartbreaking; I felt like I wasn't getting the attention (from doctors) I wanted. I just wanted to cry when I left."

In yet another doctor's office, Tracy and Gary wait for a consultation with a doctor about more aggressive strategies to conceive a child.

The hardest part, she said, was dealing with what she felt at the "loss" of a possible pregnancy each month. It would take her a week after her period to get back to being herself.

"My heart hurt so bad after I got my period," she said, "sometimes it was just easier to not try to get pregnant."

She tried to keep her frustration and depression to herself, not wanting Gary to see her struggle. But inside she was unraveling.

Seeking spirituality

In September of 2002 she took a break from it all.

She quit her job at Bartlett Gymnastics to spend a couple weeks traveling around the country to see her friends and family, to get her head together.

Tracy tries to relax after an artificial insemination procedure at Advanced Reproductive Center in St. Charles. As with a pap smear, the procedure causes irritation and cramping.

It crossed Gary's mind momentarily that her trip might be more of a goodbye tour than a refreshing vacation. She'd had bouts of depression before. "All she took was her back-pack," Gary recalled. "I dropped her off at the train station and she was gone for a month." But just as quickly as the dark thought entered his mind, it disappeared. He knew his wife better than that. Several months after her cross-country trip, in April of 2003, Tracy decided to attend a monthlong yoga workshop in Sedona, Ariz.

Her plan was to become a certified instructor, to take what she already knew and expand on it so she could help others. Her yoga classes over the previous several years had helped keep her body in shape and, she concluded, more ready to accept a pregnancy.

What she came away from the workshop with was in many ways an emotional re-birth.

Among those who are into new age spirituality, Sedona is a popular place where "vortexes" of energy combine with scenic beauty, attracting believers and tourists alike.

"I lost touch with my spirituality (while growing up)," Tracy said. "This experience brought it back to me."

In the group workshop, Tracy's infertility became a focus for others, who even held a fertility ritual for her, high atop the red rock hills.

Not the end

Tracy said the workshop helped her grow not only spiritually but physically. While there, Tracy had her first pain-free menstrual period, a sign she took as something good happening with her body. Even her chronic lower back pain that had plagued her for years diminished.

She also came to the realization that not bearing a child wouldn't be the end of the world.

"When (the workshop) was done, I started feeling this sense that I don't have to have a child, that my life will still be wonderful," she said. "The unknown became more exciting. More than a child, that passion for life was what I wanted."

Gary and Tracy had toyed with being foster parents. They'd made an appointment to begin the process of getting licensed.

Upon Tracy's return from Arizona, she was so relaxed and positive about life that she simply enjoyed being with Gary.

Even though they had decided before she left that they would investigate in vitro fertilization when she came back, Gary left the subject alone. "She was a changed person when she got back," Gary said. "Much different." Tracy was so relaxed, it seemed, that she missed her next period. She had never been late before, except when she was on fertility drugs. And she hadn't taken them for months. "It was unfathomable. I tried to keep my emotions under wraps," she said. "There was always the chance that I wasn't (pregnant) and I would be completely heartbroken."

Tracy is all smiles after her doctor agrees that she should take a more aggressive approach to becoming pregnant.

Gary urged Tracy to take a home pregnancy test, but she put it off. With a regularly-scheduled appointment with the doctor later that week, Tracy figured she would just wait for the official diagnosis.

But then curiosity got the best of her.

After shopping for a pregnancy test, she stopped by a friend's house in Batavia. If it were true, she'd have someone to celebrate with.

As she watched the dark red line appear on the test stick, she could hardly believe her eyes.

"I've never felt joy so intensely," Tracy said. "There were really no words."

She and friend Joanna Janecek danced around the house screaming that joy to the rafters.

The next thing on her mind was how to share the news to Gary. But how would she do it?

A surprise later that day seemed like a good idea.