So Matt and I have been trying to start a family for quite some time. Almost from the time we started dating...sometimes when you know, you just know. Neither of us are going anywhere. So that's basically 3, almost 3 and a half years of trying to conceive. I've spent years getting up at the same time every single day to track my cycles by taking my temperature. You learn a lot about your body that way but its tiring. After a year and half, I called my OB/GYN and asked for a referral to a specialist. We ended up at the Florida Institute for Reproductive Medicine. That place is amazing. The staff is amazing and really care about you and try to help in every way possible to help you conceive. Matt had two semen analysis' done. The results weren't great. He had great count but swimmers were not shaped correctly and didn't swim. (Probably more than most of you ever wanted to know about Matt, lol.) So the chances of us conceiving on our own were/are slim to none.
For me, they suggested an HSG or a Hysterosalpingography. Basically, they inject a dye into the cervical canal and they watch on a machine as the dye moves through your reproductive system. This allows the Dr’s to see the shape od the uterus and to see if there are any blockages that can keep you from conceiving The Dr who tried to do this test on my ran into an issue where he couldn’t get the catheter into my cervical canal. It was later determined that I had a stenotic cervix. It wasn’t letting anything in. However, since my periods were regular he didn’t think I would have a problem getting pregnant as long as he was able to get the sperm where it needed to go.
So he started me on Clomid to be used with a trigger to make me super ovulate and then would do an IUI the next day. We did 3 cycles of IUI with all the results being negative. At that point, our Dr felt that I needed to have a laparoscopy. They went in and found two very small spots of stage one endometriosis. Those spots were removed. While in there, they corrected my stenotic cervix and also did the HSG while I was knocked out and found that everything looked normal. Once I recovered, we tried one more IUI with Clomid and again, the results were negative. The Dr suggested IVF. He felt strongly that we would get pregnant if we did IVF. IVF is VERY expensive. And there are no guarantees that it will work. So Matt and I decided to take some time off from trying to conceive and try to decide what we wanted to do.
I found a couple of grants that would pay for the majority of the IVF procedure. We applied for two of them. We were supposed to hear back from one of them in mid-June. We are still waiting to hear on that grant so I’m not holding out much hope on that one. The second grant we are supposed to hear about at the end of September. We stand a better chance on that one but still don’t feel that we will get one of these grants. We did a lot of talking…do we try IVF? Do we just adopt? Are we ok with adopting? All sorts of questions are going through your head. Matt just wants to start a family and at this point doesn’t really care how it happens. I agree with him but as a woman I really want to get to experience pregnancy. I kind of feel like I am getting robbed of something that I have a right to experience. This feeling has been the toughest thing to overcome in our journey. Luckily, Matt has been very understanding.
We eventually decided to adopt. All of my friends were turning up pregnant, family too. And while I was very happy for all them (truly I was! Even if I did have to take a couple days to come out and say congrats!) but very, very sad for myself. I couldn’t deal with the disappointment anymore. Month after month of waiting to see if my period would start or if I would finally see that BFP (Big Fat Positive, for those of you not up on the lingo, lol.) It was too much to deal with, especially after one cycle where my period was four days late…I thought for sure, we’d finally done it. So…I quit! I told Matt I was ready to move forward with adoption. Just because we can’t get pregnant doesn’t mean we can’t have the family we want. Someone else’s child deserves as much long and as caring a home as my own child by blood does. So we started researching adoption agency’s.
A friend of ours adopted her two children from an agency called, A Chosen Child. They are based out of Orlando. Their prices are very reasonable compared to some of the other agency’s we looked at and our friend really great experiences when she adopted both of her children. She invited us over and showed us all her paperwork and her adoption profile and let us ask anything and everything we could possibly think to ask. We are so grateful to have her guidance, help and support. So we sent in our application with our application fee. A couple weeks later they accepted our application and here we are. Trying to scramble together more money to send in with the next round of paperwork so we can get even more paperwork, lol.
We have been slowly starting to put our future child’s room together. We got a great deal on a nice crib and couldn’t pass it up so we figured why not start to set up the room? We’ve also got some toys from friends with children who have grown out of them. Right now, everything is gender neutral as we have no idea what sex our child will be at this time. We’ve also started a book collection! Its growing quite nicely and I can’t wait to teach our child how to read and enjoy all the books that I enjoyed as a child! We have an adoption ceremony on September 19th where we will learn more about the process and get some more questions answered. I’ll take notes and be sure to post afterwards. Well, that’s all I have for now. I’ll post more later. And I’m leaving you with a picture of the baby’s room and a picture of our book shelf full of children’s books! Talk to you soon!
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