I have been meaning to write about this for a while so everyone knows what our journey entailed to get our little baby boy. I'll give a quick recap of where we have come from.
If you have read our blog, some of this will be a repeat of what you already know, but it is good to start from the beginning. When Ryan and I got married, we knew it would not be easy to start a family. When Ryan was diagnosed with cancer, they were quick to do whatever they could to save his life that they started chemotherapy treatment right away before thinking about the future and its effect on having children in the future. We were still hopeful that in vitro fertilization would allow us to start our family.
After a year of marriage, we started the IVF process and was hopeful with three embryos being implanted that one would result in pregnancy. However, it was not meant to be and resulted in a miscarriage. We were devastated, but not without hope. We knew we could try again. IVF is timely and costly so we worked out our finances and were able to try again a year later. We again implanted three embryos and pregnancy did not occur. But we were not giving up. A little less than a year later, we tried IVF again, but this time our doctors did not implant the embryos in the hope that they could help them progress a bit more before implantation. Then our worst fears came to fruition. They called us and told us the embryos were not progressing but regressing and that in their opinion we would never be able to have children through IVF. It was a very difficult time for us but with reliance on faith, hope, and our Savior we were able to heal and move towards our next step...adoption.
Our adoption story, we thought, would go a bit smoother. We knew lots of couples that had moved towards adoption and been able to adopt within a year or two, sometimes longer, but it eventually worked out for them. We had lots of help setting up our profile (this blog), completing our home study, getting wonderful references and had lots of people send us numerous leads. However, nothing ever seemed to work for us. Every lead either ended in them not responding or changing their minds and keeping the baby. I must admit that this was harder than the IVF journey. I became complacent and just figured, well, it will happen if it is supposed to happen.
We had our ups and downs. We continued to have many opportunities sent our way and we are truly grateful for everyone that has helped us through this journey. We have sent our story out to numerous agencies, birth mothers, and fostering agencies. We learn that we could try fostering to adopt but opportunities were limited as adopting from fostering families outside of the state was nearly impossible.
Then, it was time for my 20 year high school reunion. First, I had a panic attack that it had been that long since high school. Then, I made the decision of whether or not I would go home for it or not. I wasn't really sure if I wanted to go, but I kept having this feeling/prompting that I should go and reconnect with my high school friends. A lot of them knew our situation and I couldn't help but hope that maybe one of them might be able to help us in our continued search to start a family.
When the night came, it was wonderful and so many people talked to me about how they had been praying for us and hoping that we would find our baby. The one talk that changed our lives was with my friend Taylor. I hadn't seen her at the 10-year reunion and we had recently reconnected on Facebook, so I was overjoyed to see her after so many years. We got talking and the struggle to start a family came up. She mentioned that there was a place where people donated their embryos when they were done with their IVF cycles so that others could adopt them. When you participate in IVF you usually decide what to do with any remaining embryos you don't end up using. These couples chose to donate them to this clinic in order to help others start their families. It didn't really hit me at the time, but when I went home to tell my mom about my night, I realized the miracle that had happened. I was overjoyed and called Ryan about it right away.
We all felt this was the answer to numerous prayers. I sent a message to Taylor asking for the donation centers information. She sent me about five different options and we went with the first one. A place called NEDC, National Embryo Donation Center. They are located in Knoxville, Tennessee which would require some traveling back and forth, but after the initial call, we felt good about it and were excited for our first consultation.
Please go to the next tab entitled EMBRYO ADOPTION -NEDC for more details on what happened next.
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