I won $30,000 on 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' and it helped me become a mother. We played a clip from the show at our baby shower.

• Mara Apostol won $30,000 competing on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" in 2019.
• After struggling to have a child naturally, she used the winnings to fund her IVF.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mara Apostol, an assistant public defender who appeared on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" in 2019. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

By the time I applied for 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' I'd had two early pregnancy losses.

My husband and I had gotten married a year earlier and tried to have a baby right away, without success.

I remember walking away from a doctor's appointment about IVF thinking that it would be a lot of money to throw down the drain if nothing was to come of it.

The thing with all assisted-reproductive technology is that they are a crapshoot, where you could lose all your money and all you get for it is heartache and trauma.

Winning $30,000 on the show, however, ultimately gave me the freedom to embark on the very risky journey.

For all intents and purposes, the "Millionaire" money went to making me a mother.

A lot of wonderful things can happen with $30,000

During my episode, I chose to walk away at the $50,000 question, keeping my $30,000 winnings, because I wasn't comfortable taking the risk.

The host, Chris Harrison, told me that a lot of wonderful things can happen once you get to $50,000.

I replied that a lot of wonderful things can happen with $30,000.

Now, with the benefit of hindsight, and knowing what we did with that money, I'm very happy with that decision. It was the right one.

We ended up playing the clip of that interaction at the baby shower for our first child.

IVF felt like a good use of this money

Our health insurance did not help with anything involving fertility, other than very basic bloodwork. So completing our family ended up costing us close to $20,000 overall.

Once taxes are removed from the $30,000 prize, that's really a lot of what I won.

IVF felt like a good use of this money because we weren't counting on the money.

I went ahead with my first egg retrieval in June 2020, transferred the embryo in August, and that led to our son, Alexander.

People ask us if he's named Alexander after Alex Trebek. Not exactly, but it's not a pure coincidence!

We were really, really happy with Alex, but we both grew up with siblings that we really adore and we wanted to try to give that to Alex.

That led to us transferring a second embryo in June 2022, which sadly resulted in a missed miscarriage. It was horrible.

We couldn't do another transfer until January of this year, but thankfully that became our son Jonah, who was born just over a month ago.

Now, our family is complete.

Monetizing this ridiculous skill

Being able to afford reproductive healthcare shouldn't be a matter of luck to the degree that it is. It shouldn't be like winning the lottery, it really shouldn't.

But I'm very lucky that I have this ridiculous skill that most people dismiss as being a know-it-all and that I was able to monetize in a way that helped us complete our family.

It feels like it vindicates all the time that I was reading the Guinness Book of World Records as a kid or playing trivia games, and all the pub quizzes that we went to.

Perhaps, I sometimes joke, they should think about renaming the show, "Who Wants To Be a Mother?"