Saying goodbye again
During her third pregnancy, doctors sewed her cervix shut and confined her to bed rest in order to prevent premature labor. When she started having contractions at 19 or 20 weeks, she was hospitalized and prescribed drugs to stave off labor. After about a month, on June 15, 1996, Kathy gave birth to a boy the couple named Jakob.

But Jakob’s lungs were too underdeveloped, and the baby died in her arms a few weeks later.

Staff at the hospital in Santa Clara allowed Kathy to spend two days with the dead baby in a hospital room while she grieved –- a gesture of compassion she is trying to get other hospitals to replicate today.

"I am forever grateful to that hospital that they did not kick me out, they let me do what I needed to do. I spent the time. I said goodbye, I got his handprints, his footprints."

The couple's loss also deeply touched the nursing team that cared for Kathy and baby Jakob.

"It just seemed so unfair that here was this loving couple who you just felt like they would be the best parents in the world, and they couldn’t have a successful pregnancy," said nurse Stephanie Kalenda.

A stranger's kindness
A few days after Jakob’s funeral, Kalenda called the Adziches.

"She said, 'You know I’m a labor and delivery nurse and I deliver babies all the time. There's a lot of people that shouldn’t be parents but there’s some that should and you should be parents. I have a good uterus, let’s use it,'" Kathy recalled.

Kalenda, then a 38-year-old single mother, offered to be a "gestational surrogate" -- to carry Rob and Kathy’s next baby in her womb.

"I really hadn’t thought about doing it until I heard this doctor say, ‘If I wasn’t going to start my own family, I'd carry a baby for her,' and something clicked in me where I said to myself, you know, that's something that I can do."

Kalenda’s primary concern was how giving birth to someone else's child would affect her 5-year-old daughter, Katie.

"I think what we ended up telling her was that Kathy’s tummy was broken and she couldn't carry a baby, so she and Rob are going to make a baby and then a special doctor was going to put it in me. And Katie was just like, 'OK.'"

Kalenda said she always understood her role --that she was carrying the baby for someone else.

"I did always consider it Kathy and Rob’s pregnancy, not mine, to the point where if someone asked about the pregnancy I’d tell them, and people were often taken aback that it’s not my baby. It never was. It was always Kathy and Rob’s."