MIAMI – All across the county people will be gathering this week to ‘give thanks’ for the many blessings in their lives.
Among them will be a Miami man who suffered multiple medical setbacks but triumphed over tragedy to fulfill a lifelong dream.
With a loving wife by his side and a baby in his arms, Saul Alvarez is living a life he thought might never become a reality.
“You fight and you fight and you fight and sometimes you don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel,” he said.
Along with losing loved ones, in 2016 Alvarez began to battle cancer.
At the same time, he fell in love, got married, and started to imagine building a family.
“As I was fighting the cancer, knowing that I now had this relationship, one of the most important things for me was to constantly check my sperm count because I wanted to be sure I could have children in spite of all the treatments and medications that I was on,” Alvarez said.
That’s when Dr. Ranjith Ramasamy, a male fertility specialist with UHealth’s Desai Sethi Urology Institute, stepped in.
He came up with a way to protect Alvarez’s health while at the same time boosting his fertility.
“It took about a year, year and a half of different kinds of treatments, balancing the right meds to make sure we could try to bounce back that sperm count,” Alvarez said.
“To see someone like Saul where both age and the chronic conditions and the hospitalizations all of them take a hit on sperm production but to actually get that back I think is fascinating,” Ramasamy said.
In July, Alvarez and his wife Mariela welcomed their son, Alexander Rama, into the world.
His middle name is in honor of doctor Ramasamy.
“I told him that one of the biggest miracles that had ever happened was this and that I truly felt that God had put this doctor in my path. However it happened, God put him in my path,” he said.
Alvarez is now in full remission from his cancer.
He and Mariela have not ruled out the possibility of adding to their family.