2022-03-08
40 分钟Welcome to Outlook, your pit stop for life changing stories on the BBC World Service.
I'm Mubin Azhar.
Today, an American bicoastal story of lost sibling love reimagined and reborn.
Mark McDonald lives in Portland on the US West Coast.
He's an engineer, quietly spoken, not religious.
Rachel elliott lives almost 3,000 miles east in North Carolina.
She's loud and funny and God most definitely is on her mind.
We'll hear from Rachel shortly.
But this story starts with Mark and his wife, Tina.
Tina and I met in graduate school, worked in adjacent labs, and we slowly came to know each other over time and then began dating.
And after a year of knowing each other, we were essentially spending all our time together.
And as graduation approached, we started thinking about the next steps and we decided to get married.
I took Tina on a camping trip into the Adirondacks in upstate New York.
And it turned out to be a very miserable camping trip with a lot of rain.
And we were huddled in a tent in the middle of the adirondacks, a good 10 miles from the nearest vehicle when I proposed as the rain pitter patted on the roof of the tent.
And I guess that's maybe not a fair way to propose, there's not really a great exit strategy for her.
So perhaps that's just good planning on my part.
And to my delight, she said yes.
And we knew going into it from a family perspective that there might be challenges because of our medical history, that there was a risk that we couldn't be pregnant for medical reasons, at least couldn't be pregnant safely.
So Mark and Tina took some time to think through their options.