From Infertility to Adoption to Pregnant

This post has been a long-time coming.  You’re probably wondering how we got here. 

WARNING:  This is a long post.

In March we were rejected by Korea for adoption due to “medical issues”.  It happened right before Easter and completely tore us up.  Crack moms have babies every day, but a government doesn’t like our medical histories so no baby for us.  We were in the process of starting the homestudy paperwork when it happened.  From there we decided to open a profile in the US, but just had a really hard time actually doing it.   The more forms we encountered the harder it got and we really started having issues with the sheer amount of information that we had to provide.

Again; crack moms can have 10 kids that aren’t taken away but the agency and the state wanted the following from us before we could even be considered:

• 8-page biography for each of us;
• 20 photographs of us, our families, our house and our pets;
• 3 – 5 years of tax forms;
• Account numbers and balances for every investment, retirement account, savings account or checking account that we own;
• Amounts and policy numbers for every life insurance, auto insurance, home insurance, health insurance, and disability insurance account we own;
• A complete fire marshal’s inspection of our house every year;
• Criminal, credit and child protective services background checks;
• Complete medical histories for one full year;

We Did What?

But we just couldn’t do it.  Some people can, but we just couldn’t.  Hopefully no one will think we’re bad people — but it just felt like an insult and a violation that we had to go through that at a minimum just because my body was failing us.  So one day we decided to put all options back on the table; and that evening I got an email from our fertility clinic that they were allowing people to go into their Shared Risk IVF program without doing cryogenic freezing.

I know what you’re thinking… but at least let me finish.

Between the two of us we were able to agree on the things about IVF that were objectionable to us.  I called my doctor and discussed it with her, and it turned out we could do the Shared Risk program without doing anything that we objected to — we had thought we knew all about IVF but it turns out we really didn’t know anything.  We got some information packets from the clinic and then discussed it all the day that we went to NYC.  We had very deep discussions; some tears, some prayer.

Later we had discussions with some people we really love and trust, and then made our decision — we would go ahead and do it with some boundaries in place.  We prayerfully considered every aspect of the process, and it was very difficult for us.  We’d rather not re-live it, so while we are totally ok with talking about our specific IVF process, we do not want to discuss the decision making that led us here. From the moment we made our decision, we both knew that this was it for us — IVF would work.  and it did.

Our Baby is a work of ART

Because it was so difficult and personal, we did the whole thing in secret with very few having any idea — we were not sure how our family or friends would react to us doing IVF so we waited to say anything until we knew it had worked.  At that point no one would care about the IVF, they would just be happy about the baby.

IVF typically starts with suppression and in my case it was a month of birth control pills.  Some physical problems were discovered when the “Mock Transfer” was done, so I ended up having surgery before the IVF cycle started.  But 4 days after the surgery I was taking my first round of injections.  Initially it was 2 shots every night and frequent monitoring via ultrasounds and bloodwork.  As we got closer to the retrieval I started taking 3 shots per night.  And then it was time for the trigger!

The trigger was an interesting experience for us — it was my first ever self-administered intramuscular injection.  All of the other injections I gave myself were subcutaneous (in my stomach), but this one had to be given to my hind quarters, which meant John had to do it.  The night before we had to do it, he was practicing on an orange as instructed by the clinic.  I think we were both nervous.  And then the time came…. 12:15am on the morning of June 16th.  Yes, we really had to set our alarms to get up at midnight in order to mix the HCG and prep the needle.  But we did it.

Our retrieval was scheduled for 12:15pm on the 17th.  For those who don’t know, it’s an actual surgery under general anesthesia.  I had quite a bit of pain afterwards (with a mild case of OHSS) and was still secretly on Vicodin 2 days later when we met the family for Father’s Day.  I hid it pretty well, I don’t think anyone had an idea.  Starting that day we got daily reports about how our embryos were doing, and on June 22nd we transferred two of them.

Happily Ever After

The rest is history; here we are, 18 weeks pregnant as of today.  There’s only one baby on board, and no we don’t know the gender yet.

We’ve got some complications we’re dealing with so all prayer is appreciated.  Will we have another?  Maybe… maybe not.  We will not be doing IVF again — we’re thrilled and blessed to have one on the way now.  If being pregnant magically fixed whatever is wrong with me then maybe there’s another in store for us, but we’re not going to try to make that happen.  We’re just going to be happy to have this one miracle.

So This is Easter

I’ll get the happy part out so you can click away to avoid the depressing part. 

Unfortunately I got sick over the weekend, so while John had to get up at 4:30am to run sound for our two church services I was laying awake hoping the sinus pain would go away and trying not to cough.  We had planned to have Easter dinner at our house and invited John’s sister and her family over, but John made me cancel it the day before; and that was a good thing because I don’t think they would have wanted me preparing their food.

I napped for a while, but eventually just had to get up, so I decided to transplant some of my veggies from their starter pots into 3″ bio pots, in order to get them ready to go outside.  I’ve got some extras, so I will probably take them to work — I’m sure Hal will want them.  I also went outside for some sunshine, which felt really good after the very cold winter we’ve had.

I had bought (ok, actually got for free!) an 11lb shank portion ham that I was intending to serve for Easter dinner.  Since I had thawed it out I had to cook it, so we had a mini large Easter dinner.  I got the ham in the oven around 1pm, and John got home a couple of hours later.  He napped for a while, and I napped for a while, and then dinner!  Talking wasn’t working so well, with the coughing and sore throat, I was able to take and make some Easter greeting phone calls.

So now for the depressing part…

So, this was another Easter gone by without eggs, baskets, chocolate bunnies, pink dresses, or cute little suits.  I know this doesn’t make sense to a lot of people, but for people who can’t have children, time starts being marked by milestones — oh look, there goes another Christmas without squeals of joy and photos with Santa!  Easter was yet another one of them for us.  It seriously didn’t help that just a week and a half ago we were rejected by South Korea as adoptive parents.

Seriously — what better way to celebrate a holiday by being told you’re unfit for parenthood.  Somewhere in America, 15 babies were aborted and 27 crack addicts just got pregnant, but we can’t seem to succeed at being parents.  Why me?  Why us? What did we do?  Where did we go wrong?

So, that was Easter for us.  Time to pick up our heads and move forward, and start making plans to avoid leaving the house on Mother’s Day.

Adoption Update: Rejected

“I’m sorry; Korea says that they cannot work with your medical issues.”

That sucks.  Pretty bad.  No clue what we’re going to do now.

Lent, Personal Progress, and Adoption

I’ve surprised myself at how well I’ve done at not checking in on work after I leave the office.  I can’t say I haven’t been tempted, though — I have.  I did finally give in last night…  we might have a technical person coming out to visit today and I hadn’t heard anything about the timing by the time I left on Friday, so I checked the email subject lines on my Blackberry to see if I had any email about it.  I didn’t read any email, which was good, but I promised I wouldn’t check into anything, so I get a FAIL for yesterday.  All in all, it’s felt pretty good to not be tied to work, although there are moments where I start getting anxious because I don’t know what’s happening or what will be greeting me the next day.  I work with labs in Australia, Canada and Germany, and have customers in Korea — so things actually do happen in the evening and overnight that I need to respond to.

I’ve been keeping on my FlyLady sink shining and “swish & swipe” habits really well!  John even noticed that I’m shining my sink every night and has started putting his dishes on the counter next to it so that it’s still empty and shiny when I wake up.  Today is the 11th work day in a row that I’ve been in the office before 7am, which is another habit that I’d like to keep going because I get so much more done when I can get home at a descent hour.  One thing that I need to do a lot better about is packing lunches.  I get up early, and I lay my clothes out the night before so I can get out as quickly as possible, but I’m not doing so great at lunches.  I can only pack the non-perishible items at night because our lunch bags won’t fit in the refrigerator.  I had wanted to get away from packing leftovers because cooking larger dinner meals means more $$ spent at the grocery store, but I don’t know how good sandwiches would be after sitting in the fridge overnight.  Then I get up in the morning and feel too rushed to make them fresh; so we’re back into the leftovers habit.  Need to break that cycle.

We finally have news on the adoption front, and that news is: no news.  Specifically, the agency hasn’t heard back from Korea about our medical pre-approval, so they are going to check in with them.  But, they are going to send us the homestudy paperwork to start on while we’re waiting.  We can’t submit the homestudy application until we’ve met our weightloss goals (if we can go to Korea), but we can at least start compiling all of the records that we’ll need, so that feels like progress.  We’ve also done a lot of heavy thought and calculating and have decided to pay off the truck and motorcycle early so that we can get rid of those payments and start saving up for the adoption costs.  We had thought about taking an adoption loan (yes, there really is such a thing), but would like to pay in cash if we can make it work.  We’re going to have to work together to really clamp down on the budget, which could be painful. In the end, though, we’ve gotta do what we’ve gotta do.

One Down, Lots More to Go

I got too busy to post, but wanted to let everyone know that we did have our adoption agency  interview last Tuesday night.  We talked with the program coordinator for a couple of hours about everything from our childhood backgrounds to who our parenting mentors are.  With my Graves Disease and John’s blood clotting disorder she thinks it would be best if we submit medical documentation (in the form of letters from our doctors) to Korea for pre-approval.  If they review the letters and are ok with the conditions then I guess we’re in; but if they review them and don’t like the conditions then we may need to go elsewhere.  We hadn’t previously considered backup countries because we’ve been pretty intensely focused on Korea.  From the looks of it, Ethiopia may be our primary backup and if it came down to it we might discuss the China special needs program.  We don’t meet the requirements for India, and Nepal, Columbia and Guatamala are currently only adopting older children.  So Ethiopia and China may be it unless we were to switch agencies, which I don’t even want to think about right now since we’re finally getting somewhere.

So, please continue to pray over our weight loss efforts and that we will find favor with the Korean government when our doctors letters are sent over for pre-approval.

Applications and Interviews

I don’t think we told anyone, but we did get our adoption application paperwork completed (all 11 pages) and submitted on November 1st.  The agency called us last week to tell us that they had received the application but had not yet reviewed it.  The Korea program coordinator was confident that the Board of Directors would accept the application so she scheduled our initial interview for December 1st.  Once they’ve approved our application and we’ve gone through the intitial interview, the next step will be to start the home studay.  And that’s where the hurdles lie…

The agency can give us the home study paperwork packet, and we can start filling it out and collecting documentation, but we cannot turn it in or schedule home study visits until we’ve met our weight loss goal.  We’re working hard at this, and would appreciate your prayers about it:  we would like to meet this goal quickly and safely so that we can move forward in the adoption process.  For those of you who have been supporting us in this endeavor, we thank you very much.  Thanksgiving is coming up in just two days and we’ll be trying hard to keep an eye on our food intake; please feel free to join us in NOT overeating on Thursday, whether you’re at our table or enjoying fellowship and dinner at your own home.

Pre-Adoption Group: Here We Go

It’s been a while since I’ve last posted, but there was so much going on and so little to talk about all at the same time.  But the day that we’ve been waiting for finally arrived:  we attended our Pre-Adoption Group class, with our chosen agency, on the 24th.   In May, we decided that if our last IUI cycle didn’t work we would adopt.  On July 10th, that day came (and it was quite a messy day for me if you read any of my posts during that weekend) and we made the final decision.  Since then we’ve been waiting for this class since it’s only done once a month and all of the slots were filled up.

The more I think about it, the more I think that I really should start at the beginning that most of you don’t know — in fact, I think John and I are the only ones who know the full story.  We were married in 2002.  In 2004, we started occasionally discussing adopting children… but we never told anyone because we didn’t want any outside pressure.  We got lots of comments and questions about when we were having kids, and why we didn’t have them already, and some other things I won’t repeat here.  In 2005, we moved out here to cow country and it came up now and again then too but we never did anything with it because it seemed such an insurmountable problem (the costs, the time, the process).  So we put it back up on the shelf for another year.

One morning in 2006, I spent my entire commute crying while listening to Steven Curtis Chapman talking about adoption on the Focus on the Family radio show.  That fall, we talked about it again while we were painting the dining room getting ready to host John’s family for Thanksgiving.  Our genetics (my Graves disease and his clotting disorder) aren’t great, so it’s not a good idea to have biological children, right?  We even joked about turning the room that would later become our office into a bedroom under the guise of providing a place for Ashley and Eric to come and stay for weekends while secretly adopting children and shocking the heck out of our families (who still thought we just didn’t want them).  But again we put the thoughts back up on the shelf because it just seemed too hard.

2007 comes into the picture, and finally the desire for children was just too great for me to stand, so with John reluctantly in tow we started trying to have biological children — afterall, it would be quicker, easier and cheaper, right?  Right?  Wrong.  In November of last year as we were preparing to go to Delaware for Thanksgiving, I became convinced that we weren’t going to have biological children and that we should start looking into adoption.  But our doctors convinced me that everything was fine with both of us and that they could magically make us pregnant; and yet I just couldn’t believe that.  Now I understand why.

So, here we are.  5 years later and circling back around to adopting — I’m truly convinced that that’s the path that God had for us all along.  If only we had listened way back then, we could be dressing up princesses and pirates for Halloween and waiting for Santa already. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve cried over every pregnancy announcement and sometimes avoided birthday parties and baby showers because it’s just so painful… and last Christmas, I cried the whole way from our hotel to John’s parent’s house.

So, with all of that said, we finally did the Pre-Adoption Group classes.

We received our pre-class homework on Monday night (the 19th) and had 36 pages of articles to read and 6 pages of questions to think about — everything from resolving infertility to trans-racial issues.  We agreed with some articles, some enlightened us, and some made us question if we needed to figure out what the politically correct answer was.  I’m not sure if we were happy or nervous to finally be there for the class, but it turned out to be different than I thought it would be.

The facilitators encouraged thought — even dissenting thought.  We talked about infertility, how to know that you’re ready to adopt, racism, and lots of other things.  A birth mother, an international adoptee, and an adoptive family came to talk to our group about anything and everything we could think to ask.  We got a lot of good information, and have a lot of things to think about such as:

• Do we need some sort of ritual to end our infertility journey with closure?  I really don’t think we do — what we want is a child (or children), and we’re not all that concerned with the how.  Our dream of having children hasn’t died; we just changed  our plans — the dream is still alive, so we see no need to mourn it or bury it.
• Will we tell anyone what we know about our child’s birthparents, or will we leave it secret until our child is old enough to understand and decide themselves what is communicated — because it’s their story, not ours?  I think we’re leaning toward letting our child make that decision even though there will likely be pressure from our families to cough up the info.
• How will we deal with the accidental and intentional racism that we will surely encounter both from people curious about how we came to have an Asian child and from the Asian community themselves who may look on white parents with suspicion?  I know several people who have adopted from Korea and didn’t think it really still happens, but it does — Asian women asking a friend of mine if her husband is Asian after seeing her child; questions in grocery stores about why they didn’t adopt from the US, etc.
• Are we prepared to figure out the right balance of including Asian culture in our family so that our child is exposed to it but not overwhelmed by it?  I think we are; we’ve discussed these kinds of things already and we know that adopting a child into our family won’t make them white any more than it would make them Santa Claus, so we’re just going to have to watch and see; offer options for participation in Korean culture and see what they’re comfortable with.
• Are our families prepared to welcome and love a child who isn’t of our race?  I really hope so.
• While we seem to be a bit more multi-cultural than some of the other families that were there (based in the colors in our bowls during the “pom pom exercise”), we could do better by including more people of our child’s race in our interactions.  We know people who have adopted from Korea in our church and otherwise, so I think that forming closer relationships with those families will help us with that.

So, the next step for us is to fill out the application for adoption and submit it with the application fee.  We will probably have that done by Saturday.  Once they’ve reviewed the application and contacted some of our references, the agency will bring us in for an interview together as a couple.  If they are satisfied that we’re ready, then we will move into the Homestudy phase which will be lots and lots of time, paperwork, pain, and $$.

So that’s where we are today. You can help us through this process…. really!

• In order to meet the requirements of the Korean government, we will need to lose a few pounds.  I’m not going to tell you who and how many — but just know that we are doing this together.  You can help by being a positive influence on our eating.  Please respect our smaller portion sizes at meal times and don’t pressure us into having second helpings or dessert.  We surely want it, but we know that if we’re going to have children we can’t have it.  It’s not that we don’t love you or your food, but if we’re going to have a family we have to get serious and get this done.
• Don’t be afraid to ask us what’s going on, even if we’re just waiting, waiting, waiting.  We’re excited by this and love to talk about it, but we don’t want to bore anyone by always talking about it.  So please feel free to discuss it any time and ask all of your oddball questions — nothing is off limits.  We’d even be happy to discuss the infertility and race issues that came up in class; it was all very interesting and enlightening.
• Don’t be offended if we don’t come to you for a letter or a reference.  The agency is very specific about what they want and don’t want for references (for example, no family members) so that limits our choices about who we can ask.
• Pray for us and this process.  It’s going to be long, expensive and probably painful at times.  We would love to have lots of people praying for us.