Seeking God Knows What

Let’s see I left off with the referral to the reproductive endocrinologist…

T and I went to our appointment at the end of 1999 (either November or December) to meet with Dr. Young. He was nice, very positive about our option of IVF with donor eggs. The only thing I was never sure about was whether he ever really understood my childhood treatments. I know I filled the information out in their pre-paperwork, and I assumed that PH relayed the reason for the referral, but what I learned a few years later leads me to question it now.

A step backwards just a second, when T and I began discussing doing the IVF procedure, my older sister, surprisingly volunteered to donate eggs. We did a lot of talking about whether this was a good thing or a bad thing. My sister had her first child the year before and, I think, wanted us to have our first child soon too. Eventually, we decided that this would be the closest we could get to having a child with our genes and felt confident that our relationship would be able to withstand the dynamics of having my/our child biologically related to my sister. Part of the process was that all of us had to have interviews with a psychologist/social worker, separately and together, after which the social worker said she never had a group of people she felt sure would be able to handle the complexities of the situation.

So, my sister, T and I began the testing phase in January 2000. The egg retrieval and first transfer were at the beginning of March 2000. After the required two weeks of waiting, I had the blood test. Negative. It was extremely hard to hear and to have a period after it. Even though I never established a pregnancy, there had been living embryos in my uterus- it felt like a miscarriage.

About a week after the negative test, my paternal grandfather died from liver cancer. He had so much life up to his 6 months of illness prior to his death. He was a huge part of my growing up years and his passing was extremely upsetting. The only time in my life that I got absolutely passed out drunk complete with vomiting was about a week later.

May 2000 was our second try using some of the embryos we had frozen after retrieval. Again it failed. Again, I felt intense sadness when I had my “cycle” afterwards.

We gave ourselves six months to get away from the ups and downs of emotions from the two failed transfers. We did not want to leave any frozen embryos in limbo/storage and there were enough to do a transfer so we had our last attempt at the end of November 2000. I remember thinking that if the first transfer had worked, I would have been close to giving birth, but instead I was still trying to get pregnant. But it was not to be.

We both cried and then closed the door to pregnancy. In a way, I almost think it was harder for T to deal with than it was for me. I had been through the grief of infertility already and this was just a confirmation of what I knew. For T, he had to come to the acceptance that his children would not be biologically his either. Granted, he knew marrying me that adoption was likely the method we were going to build our family but once we started talking about the possibility of me getting pregnant through the IVF, I think he latched on to that idea quickly and was excited about being a dad to his biological children.

In the eighteen months from closing the pregnancy door to starting the adoption process, I said to him several times that he didn’t have to stay with me because of my inability to even be pregnant. Fortunately, he didn’t listen to me…

I have never really written about adopting Widget and being an adoptive mother. Bits and pieces while we were in the process, mostly on the adoption forums I visit, but never from beginning to present in a cohesive whole.

I think first, though, I need to write about what led us to adoption…

So here goes nothing

I’ve known most of my life that biological children were not going to be in my future. The radiation treatment I received at the age of 5 1/2 for Wilms’ tumor caused permanent damage to my ovaries and uterus. I started on hormone replacement therapy at the age of 12. Yup, I went right to menopause. Initially, I was not bothered by the infertility aspect of my life. I felt weird having to take hormones to make myself “normal”, but it was a part of my life.

Then I grew up and began dating my future husband, T (well, I thought I was grown up, I was 17). After dating for just over a year, we got engaged. Suddenly, the infertility meant so much more. Here was this guy I had fallen in love with and I realized down the road I wanted children. The loss of being able to have children with him, a combination of us, began to hurt.

Two years later, we were married. Two years after that, we began talking about becoming parents. T already knew about the cancer, the treatment, the resulting infertility because I was open with him from the beginning of our relationship. We talked about adoption and we talked about infertility treatments. My very last visit with my pediatric endocrinologist right before I turned 18, she mentioned that in vitro fertilization with donor eggs might work but it would depend on my uterus and its flexibility. We had an appointment with PH, who is both my doctor and T’s doctor. He referred us to a reproductive endocrinologist.

So that was the next step and all I feel like writing tonight…