SENSITIVE POST WITH POSSIBLE TRIGGERS…
After hearing those words—severe infertility—everything changed. It would no longer be a night of passion, an “it just happened,” a private experience with my love. Now, we had to make decisions—really difficult decisions—about how we would have our baby. And so our infertility struggle began…
Would we go through IVF? If so, how would we get the money? What would we do with the embryos that we did not implant? I cried as the doctor said they could be discarded. Let them die? I simply could not imagine tossing them aside as if they meant nothing–as if they weren’t life.
Would we adopt a baby? Domestic, international, through child services? Have you ever looked at the paperwork to adopt through child services? We have. It is pages and pages long. It asks if you will take a baby with every kind of disability—medical or otherwise—known to man. When you get pregnant, it is left in God’s hands. If your child has a disability, you accept it and cope with it and believe that it was meant to be because God chose you for this child. But when you adopt, when you have to decide if you can handle the expense, the emotion of a child with a terminal illness or severe disability… Well, how does one really make that decision?
The doctor said we could use a sperm donor. At first, I vehemently disagreed. “No,” I stated emphatically. I wanted to have a baby with my husband, not some other man. But Dane knew how much I wanted to be pregnant and he said it would be okay… So, do we use a donor? Fresh or frozen? I’ll bet many of you didn’t realize that you don’t have to “go to the bank” to make a withdrawal. You can get a personal deposit… Really personal.
So, the question became, “How badly do I really want to get pregnant?”
Well, not that badly. At least for me, a “personal deposit” was not an option. I wanted to adopt. My husband wanted to do IVF. Neither one of us knew how we could pay for any of it… But we decided to check into embryo adoption. We sent off for the information and watched the videos.
Then, we learned of a “mini-IVF” that was cheaper. So, we took a trip to Missouri to meet the doctor, only to find out that he didn’t feel we would benefit from the treatment.
We went to adoption meetings and researched on the internet and talked to our pastor and other people who had done IVF and adopted and had little kids. We prayed and we believed and we tried… We even participated in a fertility study and went through three more rounds of IUI.
And still month after month after month, no pregnancy. No baby. Just a lot of tears. And a lot of loneliness. My heart broke and I grieved for the baby I so desperately wanted but could not seem to have…
For more of our story, read “After the Diagnosis: Ten Years into Our Infertility Journey.”
