Big News!!!

Well, it's the middle of the night and I'm blogging. Just couldn't seem to shut my brain off tonight.

It's time to share our wonderful news!! In 142 days ( give or take a few days), our prayers will have been answered. We're matched with a birthmother that's due June 17th and we're getting a baby BOY!!! We've known about this for a little while and have already told family and some friends. I couldn't just all of a sudden just post in the middle of our story that we were getting a baby. I had to tell the story of how we got to where we are. Why we chose adoption. When it comes down to it, we probably could've kept on doing fertility. We were just done. Not with just the medical procedures and shots, but emotionally and of coarse the financial part does quite a number. Going through that roller coaster every month wonder if maybe, just maybe it worked this time. We chose adoption because our dream was to become parents. We want to be a family. Plain and simple. By choosing adoption we KNOW that this will happen. It wasn't a last resort for us. We chose to close one door and open another. We started the whole adoption process with rose colored glasses. We knew about the financial strain that adoption can have which is bad enough, but the stress of it all can really take a toll. We know that this isn't the only child that we want to adopt. How will we be able to afford another $20,000 or $30,000? It really makes me wish that we had never done fertility at all. Not to mention the side effects that I'm STILL having from the hormone drugs that I've been off of for almost a year. Adoption adds a fear like nothing I've ever known. In Kansas a birthmother has 12 hours after she has the baby to change her mind. I thought flying to Spain to have a donor egg IVF done was scary, but this is by far is the most nerve racking experience we've ever had. We've gone to a couple sonograms and we've watched the baby stretch and just wiggle around and I have such an incredible feeling. Like when you fall in love. It happened just like that. We just want everything to be perfect for him and his birthmother. Because if she hadn't chose us for parents we wouldn't be sharing this wonderful news! We are truly blessed to have met her and have her as part of our lives. She may never realize the extent of our gratitude.

When we first started the adoption process, we took a class and there was a video about open adoption. Until then, we had only read a couple things about how it worked. Going in from our understanding, we would meet with a birthmother a few times, go to some doctors appointments, and exchange pictures. This video painted an entirely different picture. They met each others family, the birthmother came to all of the family events and they even went on a road trip together! It definitely opened our eyes to what all open adoption could entail. Every adoption is different and I've read that some birthmothers close the adoption after some time. I can honestly say that I hope this doesn't happen with our birthmother. Of coarse that's always her decision.

It's been a while

I know that it's been quite a while since my last post. In my last post I talked about loosing our dog, Asia. I was literally emotionally drained after that post. I spent the rest of the night crying. We may have an unhealthy attachment to our dogs, we may be normal as far as our dogs go. They are part of our family. Those of you that are friends with me on Facebook know that I am a huge animal lover. I follow a lot of animal friendly sites. I've even noticed that in Michigan there's a bill that they're trying to get passed called Logan's Law. The law is to create a registry for animal abusers. I personally think that this should be nation wide. I realize that this is a fertility/adoption blog and I will get to that in just a second. If you get a chance just go to the Logan's Law Facebook page and read Logan's story.

If you're struggling with infertility. You know how it feels when everyone around you is announcing that they're pregnant. We were no exception. My husbands sister and my sister had announced pregnancies. My husbands sister gave birth to our adorable niece in April.

In June my sister went to her sonogram to find out the sex of the baby only to find out that they couldn't find a heartbeat. Turning my sister and her husbands world upside down. Her D&C was scheduled the next day. Our whole family felt the loss but it broke my heart knowing that my sister was going through something so devastating. She's an incredibly strong woman and she focused on her two boys. I know that they'll try to have another baby when they're ready. It's difficult to write about what my sister went through because even though we all felt the terrible loss, I won't say that I understand HER loss.

I do have more to talk about but I will leave that for my post in the next couple days.

The begining of our adoption process and the loss of Asia

    Since Ryan and I had already decided before we went to Madrid that if our donor egg IVF didn't work then we were going to adopt.   It wasn't really a big decision.  We wanted to be parents.  I sat down and started doing research and boy that was a huge awakening.  Adoption through an agency is EXPENSIVE!!  Through a regular agency, it could cost around $30,000!!  What average American has this kind of money just laying around? Our entire savings was wiped out by fertility treatments.  We started looking into all of our options.  We took classes to do foster care to adopt.  Once we were done with the classes we had decided that it wasn't for us.  If we were given a child knowing that the child could be given back to the birth parents in 6 months, we were going to do the best that we could to protect our hearts.  But, that's not fair to the child, so we give the child all the love and care the he or she deserves and then we're possibly left with broken hearts.  We had already gone through enough heartache.  We had to be honest with ourselves and we just weren't up for something like that.  Then my husband had heard of a non-profit adoption agency here in town.  We met with the coordinator and went home with some information including how much this was going to cost.  That's when I started looking at ways to pay for something like this. We were told that we could take our a home equity loan. We haven't even lived in our house for 3 years. That wasn't an option. There are banks that offer "adoption loans". Just none in Kansas and the ones that do offer the loans don't like to lend outside their state.   

Within a couple days we get an email from the coordinator telling us that they have a birth mother pregnant with twins and that we could be a possible match and that she was planning on looking at profile books within the week!!  We don't even have a profile book!!!  Here's the kicker.  Not only do we need this profile book done, we need to have a home study done AND take this 8 hour class that tells us all of the ins and outs of the adoption process.  We dove right in!!  We have a wonderful friend that does scrapbooking help us with the profile book.  We filled out a very long questionnaire about how my husband and I were raised, how we feel about being infertile, how we feel about our jobs, how we feel about each other, etc.  Our finger prints had to be sent in and we had to have extensive background checks done.  Then we had our homestudy done.  All of this had to be done just in case the birth mother liked our profile book and wanted to meet us.  She decided that she wasn't ready to look at the books.  Considering how hectic it was for us to get all of this stuff done so quickly, for us, we found it a little humorous.  We couldn't even begin to imagine the turmoil that she's going through though.  We just waited for a phone call to either say that she was ready or someone else wanted to meet with us.  Eventually we did get the call to meet with the birth mother.  To be honest, open adoption had us a little nervous.  We were still in the process of understanding how open adoption works.  What if she was really demanding or what if we just didn't click with her. And even if we didn't mesh well, it's not like we would actually say no to getting the baby or babies.   It was a lot of worry for nothing.   She was amazing.  Her family was amazing.  We couldn't imagine a better meeting.

    We met with her a couple more times within a 3 month period.  According to the agency, we were "matched".  We started planning.  My mom bought us a twin stroller and some baby girl clothes.  We had also started doing fundraisers.  Even though we weren't going through a big agency, this was still going to cost a pretty penny.  There's a placement fee of $6000 per baby, about $2500 for counseling for the birth parents and then there's legal fees.  We decided to host 3 garage sales at 3 different locations.  Our friends and family got the word out and people donated tons of items for us to sell.  With the 3 garage sales we made close to $2400.  Some of this went to our homestudy fees and the 8 hour class that we had to take which cost $500.  Then someone that neither of us knew offered to do a Thirty-One fundraiser for us.  Thanks to her and our friends and family, we made $200 from that.  At that fundraiser, someone else offered to do a quartermania.  I'm still not sure I know how a quartermania works.  The turn out for that was great as well.  We made about $400 from the quartermania itself and a wonderful family friend gave us a $500 check. 

   All of these wonderful things are going on in these 3 months.  We even managed to trade in my husbands car to lower his car payment.  The day after we do this I wake up to Asia (our 16 year old husky) trying to drag herself into the living room.  I had originally thought that her hind legs had just slipped out from under her and she just couldn't get her footing on the flooring.  I had helped her to the area rug that we had bought when she had gotten so sick before so she had something with traction to help her get up.  We hated seeing her have to try so hard to just get up.  I let her lay on the rug for about 45 minutes so she could rest.  After that I had tried to get her to get up just to make sure that everything was okay.  She wasn't okay.   She couldn't use her hind legs and her hind paws had curled up. We had tried what we could think of to get her to try to move.  We offered her a treat and an ice cube.  We even tried brushing her.  If anything was going to make her get up and move it was the evil brush.  None of these worked.   I didn't want to take her to the emergency vet.  I wanted to take her to our regular vet.  This was on a Sunday and our vet offered to meet us at his office.  I sat in the backseat with her and cried the whole way to the vets office.  She just laid her head on my lap.  When we got there Ryan had to carry her in and laid her on the examining table.  The vet looked her over and figured that it was her tumor that they had found this past March attacking her nerves.  He said that we could probably do treatments that might help, but pretty much said that her quality of life wasn't going to be what it should.  She wasn't going to bounce back from this.  I had to make the decision to let her go.  Ryan and I said a prayer for her and told her how much we loved her.  For 16 years I dreaded having to make a decision like that.  I never thought that I would be strong enough to be in the room with her if she ever had to be put to sleep.  But that day came and there was no way that I was going to leave her when she needed to know how much I loved her one last time.  So, I stayed.  I had to hold her head while the vet administered the sleeping shot because of the way she was laying.  I kissed the top of her nose like I always did and told her that I loved her as I watched the life leave her eyes.  I had lost my baby girl.  Ryan had loved her too.  Even though she was always chewing up his things.  She was a little jealous of Ryan sometimes.  We had a personal cremation done.  Her remains are in a beautiful wooden box next to a framed picture of her in our living room.

  Not to long after the loss of Asia we find out that our birthmother had decided to keep her babies.   We were disappointed but not angry.  When we hadn't heard anything from the agency for a couple weeks, we called.  Then waited I think 4 days to receive a call back only to find out that the birthmother had decided to parent.  What had us upset was that we had to contact the agency to find this out.  It's like they were to busy to give us a call.  This was in July.  We've only received a couple emails since then, but that's it. We've started looking into other agencies that adopt out more than 6 babies a year and private adoptions as well.  We're hoping that we can get better results with one of these other routs.  Fingers crossed.  But for now we sit and wait...and fund raise. 

 Adoption Bug Fundraising t-shirts
http://www.adoptionbug.com/babybarber/

                                                   Asia October 1, 1998- June 24, 2012

Try to ignore the insensitive people.

   Our last stand with fertility was in March of 2012. I know that I use “I” a lot in this bog.  That's only because I'm writing it.  My husband is going through this as well.  Yes, women have the biological clock, but that doesn't mean that Ryan doesn't want a baby any less than I do.  He would be an amazing father and I can't wait for the day that I get to see him in action.  Some marriages don't survive the struggles of infertility.  We feel that it's helped us grow closer.  When someone shares their "big news" about being pregnant, he knows about the little pain in my heart because he has it too.  It's not really jealousy.  It's more like a little reminder of the emptiness that's there.  It's getting better, but it may never go completely away.  I was in the birth room when both of our nephews were born.  For me there's no experience to compare it to, so I can only imagine what it was like for her.  Ever since I've heard my oldest nephews first cry, a wave of emotions come over me when I hear a newborn baby's cry. 

    Since we've started our fertility process there have been some people that just aren't sure about the right thing to say to us and end up saying something they probably shouldn't have said.  Then there are the idiots.  We were vocal about our fertility issues because we didn't want to be bombarded with the "so, when are you two going to have a baby?" question.  Trust me, whether you tell people or not this question will be asked.  I think it's just a question that people ask to make conversation.  Sometimes we'll drop the bomb and just say that we're infertile.  Then we feel bad for making them uncomfortable so, we tell them that we're adopting.  Then there are the ones that just flat out tell you that maybe you're just not meant to be parents.  What kind of a person says this?!!  The really stupid kind!!  Also, if you're telling me that you probably wouldn't go as far as doing fertility but you know exactly how I feel and you're in the same boat as me.  I will say this.  If you're not willing to go to hell and back to create a family then you're not in my boat.  I understand that adoption isn't for everyone and fertility isn't cheap.  We opened an 0% interest credit card, used our savings and had help from our family to achieve our fertility treatments.  If you want a baby and fertility IS an option for you, I know of people who have done fundraising to raise the money for their treatments.  We're not trying to create even more debt by adopting.  Going through a local non-profit organization we're thinking that it will cost us close to $20,000.  Give or take a couple thousand.  We're not sure how much legal fees will come to.  This is why my husband and I have been doing fundraising to help with the cost of our adoption.  I'll jot down some of the fundraising options that we've used in my next post. They've been a tremendous help so far. 

How do you say hamburger in Spanish?

   It's difficult to describe what we were feeling through all of this.  We're just scraping the top of a whole mess of emotions with this bog.  I know that I've forgotten quite a bit that should be in here.  I still hope that this is informative for anyone that is seeking fertility or adoption.  I'm excited that people are reading our story.  Lucky for every one reading, this will be the last time you get to read about my uterus.  

  Determined to have our biological child, we went through our finances.  Over and over again.  There was just no way that we could pay $24,000 to have a baby.  If we did and it didn't work...that would be it.  We wouldn't even be able to afford to adopt a child.  We wanted to give it one last try though.  There had to be other options.  So, I hit Google!!  After hours of research, I had found a few places that did donor egg IVF.  Czech Republic, Madrid or Costa Del Sol Spain.  The Madrid clinic had the highest success rates, so that was the one that we chose.  So, with some money help from our family we put plans in action.  We started dealing with the IVF coordinator for the Spain clinics who worked at a sister clinic in Athens, Greece.  We were matched with an egg donor that had similar characteristics with me.  She was 5'3" , slight build, brown hair with blue-green eyes and she was a proven donor!!!  I still couldn't believe that we were going to fly to Spain to have this done for so much cheaper than it would've been here.  The donor egg IVF was costing us about $8,000.  After air, hotel and food the total came to about $14,000.  Why is it so much cheaper there?  They don't pay the donors.  The women that go through all of the stim shots and go through the egg retrieval do this as a pure act of kindness.  They help people like us with a dream of creating a family. 

  Trying to get my prescriptions ordered by our fertility clinic here by request of this IVF nurse in Athens was a HUGE pain.  I was put on birth control again for a couple months and about 2 weeks before we were due to leave the country, I had to get a Menopur shot.  This was supposed to put my body in a shut down state.  About a week before we left I started getting shots to get my uterine lining ready for the embryo transfer and I started getting shots to keep me from ovulating.  All we had to do was wait to leave.  I was sick about this.  I didn't want to leave the country.  I've never been on a plane for 13 hours before and I was pretty freaked out about that.  Plus Asia (our 16 year old husky) had been sick a couple months before.  Not a little sick either.  We really didn't think that she was going to pull through.  On top of that, when we had taken her to the vet to find out that she had Pancreatitis, they had also found a tumor the size of a softball in her stomach that was pushing her intestines into her upper body.  She was back to normal in about a week or so.  I was still so afraid that something was going to happen to her while we were gone and we were about to leave the country for 14 days!!  It was all I could think about. 

  Luckily our flight to Madrid was an overnight one and there isn't much to tell.  We took a cab to our hotel.  We wanted to stay in a hotel that was nice but affordable.  We didn't want to stay in a bad area and we figured that they wouldn't have a nice hotel in a bad part of town.  Our room was really small but the weirdest thing to us was the fact that instead of a wall separating the sleeping area from the bathroom it was frosted glass.  I know that we're married and all but we still want a little bit of privacy.  It was time to get out and see the city a little bit.  I rode a subway for the first time.  Not on my list of favorites in Madrid.  It was exhausting.  Plus  I was in a compact place with a ton of people staring.  I stuck out like a soar thumb.  Not a lot of blonds over there.  I'm a little curious what the thought process was on designing the subway system over there.  We would go upstairs, then downstairs just to go upstairs again!!  If you've ever seen the movie Labyrinth, this is what the subway reminded me of.  It really felt like the entire city was uphill.  Even walking downhill it felt like we were walking uphill.  Thank God for Ryan.  I have absolutely no sense of direction.  He navigated around that city like a champ!!  Our subway exit was a few blocks from the clinic.  When crossing one of the streets, I had tripped on the curb and fell in the street.  Ryan still had a hold of my hand and was dragging me.  Meanwhile there were cars just driving by looking at us.  I was laughing so hard I couldn't get up. 

  We really didn't know what to expect when we went for our first visit at the clinic.  It's was all white.  Very clean.  And our doctor was American!!!  She had informed us that they had done the retrieval on the donor earlier that day and they got 9 eggs!!!  Sure better than my 3 dud eggs.  They did ICSI using Ryan's swimmers on the eggs.  ICSI is when they use a tiny needle to insert the sperm into the egg.  We got a call the next day saying that all 9 of the eggs fertilized!!  We have embryos!!  They would keep us informed on weather we would do a 3 day transfer for a 5 day transfer.  On a 3 day transfer they no longer think that the quality of the embryo will get better, so they decide to go ahead and transfer them into the uterus.  On a 5 day transfer you've hit blastocyst stage.  The embryo has developed so much that it is starting to bust out of the shell.  This is the highest chance of implantation.  We transferred 3 beautiful blastocyst embryos on the 5th day.  Normally they don't transfer more than 2 but since we had some so far she transferred all 3.  Ryan called a taxi to take us back to our hotel.  I'm supposed to be on bed rest for the next 24 hours.  This might drive me crazy.  Did I mention that the only tv channels that were in English was a music channel and a type of investment channel?  Ryan gets me back to the hotel and gets me settled in then goes to get me something to eat.  He was only going to go up the block to grab me a hamburger.  He ended up being gone for about an hour!!  I was really starting to freak out wondering what was taking him so long.  It seemed like every time he would leave without me, I would hear sirens off in the distance.  If you saw the way people drive over there you would worry too.  I don't even know why they bother putting lines on the road.  It's just so different.  When he gets back, he informs me that the restaurant up the street closes for a while during the day then opens back up again around 8pm.  Apparently this is a common thing with restaurants there.  So my wonderful husband hops on and off the subway a couple times to go to McDonalds because that's pretty much the only place that has a hamburger the way that I want it.  I'm not adventurous when it comes to food.  I did try Topas over there which is thinly sliced pork and cheese on some bread.  A HAM AND CHEESE SANDWICH without condiments!!  Anyways, my amazing husbands adventure didn't just stop at McDonalds.  He hopped on the subway again and went to Starbucks for cheesecake.  I am one lucky girl.

   We weren't very vocal about why we were going to Madrid, so a lot of people just thought we were going on a vacation.  We went to the Palace and Retero Park while we were there, but this was far from a vacation.  I thought an IVF here was a lot of pressure.  That didn't even compare to this kind of pressure.  My body had one job to do...make a nice and cozy home for those three little embryos.   After all, I did have that "picture perfect" uterus that the doctors were talking about along with a 75% success rate, it's hard to not be optimistic. 

  Finally it was time to come home.  We were ready to get home to our family and our dogs.  Did I mention that we actually tried to Skype with the dogs?  Didn't really work out the way we planned, but at least we could see them and see that Asia was doing okay. 

  We wait the 15 days after the transfer and I go in for the blood pregnancy test.  I hadn't had any early signs of my cycle starting, so we were feeling pretty good!   We had taken the afternoon off of work.  We knew either way we were going to want to be around each other after we got the results.  Ryan always has the doctors office call him with any results.  I would rather hear any news from my husband.  Bad or good, he knows exactly how I feel because he's going through it too.  Donor egg IVF didn't work for us.  Our test was negative.   This was it.  No biological traits from either of us, but that's not what was hurting the most.  We're not going to experience all the little pregnancy symptoms that some women complain about.  We're not going to experience morning sickness, the sonograms, finding out if we're having a girl or a boy.  No talking to my stomach while the he or she  was growing inside me.  Or that feeling that's impossible to describe when I've given birth to our child.  None of this was for us.  We were chosen to go down a different road.  But just because it wasn't we had originally planned, that doesn't mean that it won't be any less amazing. WE'RE ADOPTING!!!

                   



                                          This is where our story goes down a different road.

   We had decided to start a family right away, but apparently WE don't get to decide that.  Two months after our wedding I went in to have a cyst removed from my right ovary.  Turns out I had a little bit of endometrosis too.   No big deal.  My OBGYN told me that I would be super fertile for the next 3 months because they clean everything out and  everything can flow smoothly.  Well, after 3 months and no pregnancy I called my OB and was told to "just keep trying".   How long are we supposed to "just keep trying"?  I'm in my thirties and we would like more than one child.  We decided to turn to a fertility specialist.  He started me off on Femara (which is just like Clomid).  I reacted well to the drug, but something just wasn't clicking and after 3 cylces of just Femara it was time to step it up a bit.  My dosage of Femara was doubled and we started using a "trigger" shot.  This shot was given to me by my wonderful husband in my stomach.  This shot is used to trigger ovulation.  Only 2 cycles of this method was done.  It was time to move on to IUI's or commonly known as "the turkey baster method", but after taking all the drugs and going to the clinic to find out if I was going to get the shot that night, they had realized that I had already ovulated.  All the money that we had spent on medication and doctor visits for that cycle just went down the drain.  We were so frustrated after that we had to take a little break.  We needed a plan.  Plus I was starting  to feel really depressed.  I don't know if it was the drugs that was making me feel this way or the sinking feeling that we weren't going to have our own biological child.

      We had only planned on doing 2 IUI's because the procedure itself is about $1500 and it's usually done if there's a problem on the guys side.  Ryan wasn't the problem, I was.  No sense in wasting money that could go towards a procedure that had a higher success rate.  I was put back on Femara, received a Gonal F shot every evening for about 7 days.  Gonal F is a follicle stimulant.  Follicles hold eggs.  In a normal cycle without any drugs one egg will release when ovulating.  When on these drugs there's a bigger bang for your buck.  That's why twins, triplets or more are so common.  I would go into the clinic.  I would go to the clinic at the beginning of the cycle for the blood test and the ultrasound to make sure there were so cysts on my ovaries.  Some of those nurses think that they're playing an Atari game with that wand.  It was painful.  I would have to go in a couple more times to see how well my follicles are doing and when we should use the "trigger" shot.  Every time we did this it would cost us about $150.  The blood tested are over $200.  This is all racking up quite a bill.  On our 2nd and last IUI we wait the entire 15 days before we would test.  It was on a Friday.  I stopped and bought a test on my way home from work.  We both knew that if there was a test in the house we wouldn't be able to make it the whole 15 days.  As soon as Ryan got home from work I took the test.  We just kind of sat around for a few minutes and I went in to check the results.  PREGNANT!!!!  Digital and clear as day!!!  The excitement was overwhelming.  We called our parents and told them the news.  One thing with fertility, you can't really  surprise your family.  Everyone knows your cycle.  I took another test later that night and it came out negative.  I thought that maybe my HSG levels weren't very high yet.  I would take another test in the morning and not test anymore until our blood test on Monday.  That test was positive.  We went with that!!  We were on cloud 9 all weekend.  Until our negative blood test on Monday.  It was a feeling that neither of us had ever felt before.  After that we decided to try one more IUI.  If we could get pregnant only pending $1500 instead of spending $10,500 we're sure going to give it another try.  Another negative.

    Time to break out the big guns.  IVF (in vitro fertilization).  This is what's known as fertilizing the egg outside of the body.  In a lab.  We had to take a class explaining the process and how the drugs could make me "crazy" and for all intensive purposes I would be back to normal after it's all done.  Unless I was pregnant.  We both had to have some extra testing done and I was put on a whole new cocktail of drugs.  I was put on birth control for a month and a half to put my cycle where the doctor needed it to be.  Then I was to receive 2 different shots in the stomach for 10 days.  I would have all kinds of doctors appointments to track everything.  Blood tests every other day to test my estrogen levels and then the intrauterine ultrasound.  Every time we would go to the clinic they would ask how I was feeling.  I was feeling fantastic!!  I was in a great optimistic mood the entire time.  They were a little concerned since I wasn't producing very many eggs, but everything was going to go as planned.  I received my "trigger" shot on Halloween of 2011.  This shot was different than the other ones.  This one was an intramuscular injection.  Ryan showed me the needle after he gave me the shot.  It was the biggest needle I had ever seen.   36 hours later we're headed to the surgery center for my egg retrieval.  Let me tell you...I am a nervous wreck!!!!  You see, I had made the mistake of Googling the procedure.  These people were going to take a hollow needle, shove it through my uterine wall, into my ovaries, drain my follicles and suck out the little eggs.  It wasn't as harsh as it sounds, but that's how I had it pictured in my head.  They took out 3 eggs!!  I was so worried that they wouldn't even make it to the embryo stage.  But, the eggs fertilized just fine and we transferred the embryos three days after the retrieval.  It was time for the dreaded "two week wait".  I may not have had many eggs but the doctors told me that my uterus was picture perfect.  This was going to work!!  During the wait, I'm Googling every possible symptom that I could be having, but everything could either be an early pregnancy symptom or side effects from the fertility drugs.  The only sure way to tell was the pregnancy test.  Just before we were getting ready to go get my blood pregnancy test done, I had gotten my monthly cycle.  We went in for the test anyway.  We're both crying as the nurse is taking my blood.  It was just a flat out horrible day.  What were we supposed to do now?  We had used a credit card, our savings and some help from family to get to this point.  How are we supposed to go further?  We wait a little while before we talk about our next step.  We had decided to try IVF one last time.  We made our appointment to see our fertility specialist and talk about why our IVF might not have worked.  We weren't expecting him to tell us that I have DOR (diminished ovarian reserve) and very low AMH levels.  In a nut shell the few eggs that I am producing are pretty much crap.  We had about a 10% chance of a successful IVF if we chose to try again.  Considering IVF on average has about a 65% success rate, there was no way we were going down that road.  There were other options.  Donor eggs!!!  I didn't care if our baby didn't have any of my genetic traits.  I was still going to have the chance to experience pregnancy and birth.  They have egg donors that they try to match you with that has similar traits.  Here's the kicker though.  This is going to cost about $24,000.  WHAT??!!!! 

Once Upon a Rainy Day

  On Friday, September 25, 2009 Ryan and I were married in an outdoor ceremony.  A pretty big gamble hosting a wedding outside in Kansas and let me tell you why.  It stormed like crazy just a few hours before the ceremony was due to start.  For some odd reason all this severe weather didn't bother me at all.  I actually found it amusing.  I just had a feeling that the rain was going to stop and if it didn't, as corny as it sounds, I was still marrying the man that I love.  From what I've been told, the rain stopped and the sun had started to peek out just as I had started walking down the path to the alter.  I was also told that there was even a rainbow.  The ceremony was short and sweet.  I loved everything about our wedding.  I'll be honest though.  I tried to talk Ryan into eloping at first.  I'm glad that he put his foot down.  After some great company and a little dancing to Footloose, the reception was over and it was time to go home to our dogs and start our life together.  Not even thinking that our dream of starting a family was going to have some serious hiccups along the way.