Baby miracle for TV host Sally Obermeder: from cancer to surrogacy, the family I never thought I’d have
After surviving an aggressive cancer while pregnant with her first baby, TV presenter Sally Obermeder and her husband, Marcus, never expected to have another child. Here, The Weekly is delighted to introduce Elyssa Rose, who was born just before Christmas
When Sally Obermeder gave birth to her first baby five years ago, the pity in the delivery room was palpable. Sally had learned only 24 hours earlier that what she assumed was a harmless lump was an aggressive form of breast cancer, and everyone – especially Sally and her husband, Marcus – feared she wouldn’t live to see her baby’s first birthday.
As she struggled through a long, traumatic labour, Sally remembers “just choking on everyone’s sadness”. She delivered a healthy, beautiful daughter, Annabelle Grace, but what should have been one of the happiest moments of her life was tainted by terror and heartache.
On a frigid Milwaukee day last December, though, when an American surrogate gave birth to the couple’s second child, there was only elation. “It was just pure joy,” recalls Sally – and all the more emotional because of the trials they had overcome to get there.
“I felt like Rachel [the surrogate] not only gave me a baby, she gave me the chance to redeem that first birth in my memory – she wiped the slate clean for me,” says the 43-year-old co-host of the Seven Network’s afternoon show The Daily Edition.
“It was just so happy and so joyous.” Cuddling her baby outside a Sydney studio while food stylists and photographers shoot her third recipe book, Sally gives her deliciously chubby newborn a bottle and describes her daughter’s thrilling December 12 arrival. After waiting in a Milwaukee hotel for more than two tortuous weeks, Sally, her sister, Maha Koraiem, and Annabelle got the call that morning: Rachel’s waters had broken and the baby was finally on the way.
As Marcus and Sally’s mum watched the birth from Sydney via FaceTime, Sally and Maha supported Rachel, along with Rachel’s husband, in the delivery room. Holding hands, Sally and Rachel seemed to almost labour in tandem, Sally at one point getting the shakes just like her surrogate, the two of them crying happy tears together.
“It was really just the weirdest but most wonderful experience of my life,” says Sally. Watching online, Marcus says his wife “looked like she was going through every emotion in the world, like she was exploding from the inside out”.
Once Elyssa Rose arrived, Sally cut the umbilical cord and was given skin-to-skin contact with her baby – and all the while, Rachel’s focus remained on Sally. “You could see in Rachel’s eyes that a lot of the thanks was being transmitted right there and then at the birth,” says Marcus. “She did it because she was offering a gift to Sally and you could see the pay-off was there for her.”
Still, carrying someone else’s child is an astonishing act of generosity, especially when you consider that little more than two years earlier, when the pair set out on this surrogacy path, Sally and Rachel were complete strangers. By then,
Sally had undergone 18 months of brutal cancer treatment, including a double mastectomy, radiation and 16 rounds of chemotherapy, and doctors had given her the all-clear. Another baby, though, was out of the question because pregnancy would most likely cause the cancer to come back.
Sally had tried to accept it –
“There’s no point in having two children and not being around for them,” she reasoned – but eventually
she couldn’t ignore her yearning for another child, or Annabelle’s pleas for a sibling. Sally and 38-year-old Maha are exceptionally close – they talk 20 times a day, run their lifestyle website, SWIISH, together, and even turn up by mistake wearing identical mini-dresses and sandals for today’s interview. Sally wanted her daughter to enjoy a sibling bond like that, too.
Sally’s age and cancer history meant adoption was impossible, but surrogacy made sense. After all, Annabelle was conceived by IVF and the couple had four frozen embryos (produced from their own eggs and sperm) left over, ready to be implanted.
For Marcus, there was also an ethical imperative. “I personally felt that not trying to bring [those embryos] to life would be the wrong thing to do,” says the 46-year-old investment manager. “I felt there was life there – they were little children in the early stages.”
In Australia, though, commercial surrogacy is illegal. According to the law, which varies from state to state, a woman can carry a baby for someone else, but can’t be paid any more than her medical and out-of-pocket expenses. Some people have asked Sally why Maha didn’t do it, but that was never an option. “I wouldn’t want her first birth experience to be having my child,” says Sally. “She has the right to have her own children.”
Besides, it’s generally recommended that surrogates be mothers already – because they have to give up the baby and it’s easier to do that if they have their own children to go home to. Sally says she called an agency in the US, explained that she needed a so-called “altruistic surrogate” who wouldn’t be paid, and the agency put her in touch with Rachel, a neonatal nurse who had three daughters and had been a surrogate once before. Rachel and her police officer husband met Sally and Marcus on a FaceTime call, which felt like a bizarre double date, and the Obermeders were instantly sold on the Wisconsin couple.
“They are all about giving back,” explains Sally, “all about love and kindness.” Rachel was keen to be a surrogate one last time, but only for the right couple and the right reasons. “Because I’d been sick, that really struck a chord with her,” says Sally. “She wanted a happy ending for this story.” Rachel could not have known, however, that it would take two tumultuous years to reach the final chapter. In December 2014, Sally, Maha and Annabelle met Rachel and her family in Los Angeles, where the first embryo was implanted. They were all delighted when Rachel became pregnant, but the fairytale run ended with the 11-week scan.
Sally fights back tears as she recounts that morning in a Sydney cafe, where she, Annabelle and
Maha tuned in to Rachel’s doctor’s appointment online to see the first ultrasound image of the baby.
“Everyone was just bubbling with excitement and we were squealing and talking over each other … and then I could hear Rachel crying,” recalls Sally. The doctor couldn’t find a heartbeat. “I was just in this cafe bawling my eyes out and Rachel was sobbing. I felt so sorry for her because she was doing this for me and now she had to go in and have the D and C [dilation and curettage] – and I’ve caused this heartbreak. I felt so guilty.”
Recalling the shock and bitter disappointment of that day, Maha says, “There are just no words. Sal lets herself feel the feelings – there’s no denying the downs – but then it’s, ‘Okay, let’s pick ourselves up’.”
After the miscarriage, the second and third embryos didn’t take, either. Marcus’ mum died of cancer at the end of 2015 and by then Sally was so emotionally wrung out she told Rachel she needed a break. “It was all just starting to take a toll,” says Sally. “There was too much sadness.”
With only one embryo left, it was suggested, even by Rachel, that she try a different surrogate, but Sally was adamant. “It was just like, ‘However this ends, this is our experience – you and I. I just love you too much to do it with anyone else.’”
“The birth was just so happy and so joyous.”
Sally tried to remain philosophical and never lost sight of how lucky she was to have Annabelle – and her life. “I was like, ‘What will be, will be. I already have everything – I survived.’ That actually is everything. I already got the prize.”
And then came the cherry on top. Rachel became pregnant with the final embryo early last year and the Obermeders broke the news in July at a party for their 15th wedding anniversary, at the 20-week mark.
After almost two months in the US – waiting for the birth and then sorting out legalities such as the baby’s passport and birth certificate – Sally brought Elyssa home to Sydney in January.
“I’m blown away,” says Marcus, whose work in Sydney kept him from joining his family in the US. “It is a bit of a spin-out because it’s a bit Brave New World, a bit of a science-fictiony-type journey, but at the end of the day, it’s quite simple: we’ve got a second child and we love her. For us, it just completes that feeling of family. It’s so worth it.”
There’s no doubt it has been an expensive exercise: specialist lawyers in Australia and the US; medical expenses; travel costs for Rachel and the Obermeders – all as the Australian dollar was weakening.
Sally says she stopped adding up the bills so it wouldn’t upset her. Has it cost more than $100,000? $200,000?
“I don’t want to put a number on it,” replies Sally. “If you’re in, you’re all in. All you can do is suck it up.”
Sally knows a thing or two about “sucking it up”, and attributes most of her success to determination – just her sheer refusal to give up. She had the fortitude to face cancer and surrogacy, she says, because of the self-belief she developed as a young woman – when she lost 30 kilograms in her 20s and, later, when she left finance to break into television, working for years in menial TV jobs for nothing. “At school, I was never really anything – never really bright or sporty or musical or arty – so I never had anything that was mine that I could pursue,” she says. “I’m just very average, but having those [difficult] experiences has forced me, or allowed me, to get quite strong.”
Through the illnesses, financial stresses and original six-year struggle to have Annabelle, her “happy, healthy” marriage has been a constant – “elastic enough that it stretches with the strain and comes back together”.
When Sally tries to stay busy and block out emotions, it’s Marcus who forces her to face them. “I’m a doer,” she says, “and Marcus is a talker.”
These days, neither of them is getting much sleep, and yet Sally feels surprisingly okay – perhaps, she says, because she was too weak to even get out of bed when Annabelle was a newborn.
An exotic product of French and Egyptian parents, Sally looks as fresh as ever – all olive skin, chocolatebrown eyes and perfect television teeth – the ultimate advertisement for the healthy lifestyle that she espouses on her website.
The recipe books she has written with Maha, Super Green Smoothies and The Good Life, have both been best-sellers and the pair recently launched their Super Green Smoothies frozen supermarket packs, a mixture of ready-to-blend veggies, fruit and herbs, so people can whip up smoothies at home in 60 seconds without having to wash, chop or measure ingredients.
“When she gets an idea,” says Marcus, “she backs herself.”
According to Sally, people have always underestimated her, so she has learned to become her own cheerleader.
Elyssa lets out a cry and Sally rocks her in her arms, gently shushing her “little potato” back to sleep. On maternity leave from the Seven Network’s The Daily Edition until the end of August, Sally is savouring her time with the girls, taking Annabelle to school, playing tea parties and working through her headstrong five-yearold’s “summer fun list”, which includes setting up a lemonade stand. This time, says Sally, is for Annabelle as much as it is for Elyssa – a “happy do-over” to make up for Annabelle’s first year of life shuttling between medical tests and radiation appointments.
Last October, Sally had her allimportant five-year scan and was told her cancer is in complete remission. She suspects she will never truly shake off the nagging fear of it coming back – but nor will she ever take life for granted again either.
“It’s such a cliché, but it’s true,” says Sally. “When you thought you were going to die, you love everyone harder and you love everything harder because you realise it’s not forever. I have survived that time, but there will be a time, and none of us are immune. Marcus and I often say, ‘ These are the happy days, the ones you look back on.’ This is heaven.
Just look at her.”
Sally’s story will feature in an upcoming episode of the Seven Network’s Sunday Night program.
“It completes that feeling of family. It’s so worth it.”