Well, this thread did not go at all the way I imagined. And here I thought I was sharing a story of hope, when what I was actually doing was harming others. But I guess if you want to hear the darker side of the story, here it is:
My wife, due to a condition called McCune-Albright Syndrome, was given a less than 1% chance of ever conceiving naturally. When we decided to try to have kids, we went straight for the IVF as our best shot. IUI was unlikely to work, and if it didn’t work, there was no way we could afford IVF as well. As it was, our relatives went into hock for us, we borrowed more than we could afford, we used cut-rate medications to strip our costs down even more, and still spent over $9000 for the IVF.
It was pretty much pure hell. I hate needles myself, and yet in the course of around two months, I had to give my wife a total of 84 shots, in her legs, arms, stomach, and finally in her backside. I’m sure she was even less thrilled with receiving them than I was giving them; the last round of shots, some chemical I can’t even remember now that came in an oil base, used a large-gauge, long-ass needle, and those things had to hurt. There were nights where her body chemistry was so messed up that she was crying from pain and begging not to have any more shots. Somehow we did them all. They finally got some eggs, fertilized them, and implanted them.
We got the call just before Thanksgiving that her pregnancy test was positive. That was the “best Thanksgiving ever”, with all the well-wishes and the promise of a baby on the way. Presents came flying. And then, a few days later, we get the call that her HCG level, which should shoot up like a rocket during pregnancy, had dropped like a stone, from a high of 80 to around 4. No baby for us. My wife called me at work and I sped home; I don’t remember a thing about the trip, it’s a miracle I made it in one piece. We spent days in a daze, and there were lots of tears. My wife doesn’t know this, but one clear memory I have of that week was me in the closet, packing up the baby stuff so she wouldn’t have to look at it. Someone had given us the book “Love You Forever.” I looked at the cover and broke completely.
The best Thanksgiving ever became the worst Christmas ever. We’d agreed to host the big family Christmas at our house, so we were deluged with relatives, including about a dozen little kids. My wife tried to be a good hostess, but all she could think, looking at all the kids running around having fun, was, “This is what I’ll never have.” We didn’t have the money to try again, even if we were physically and emotionally capable.
Adoption came up first on the car ride back from her dad’s house that New Year’s. It was all we had left. We started the foster-adopt classes that January, and we finished the course, but along the way we decided that a domestic adoption wasn’t for us. So, we looked at international adoption, specifically China, and started collecting the massive amounts of paperwork we needed to adopt.
On August 2nd, the date my wife would have given birth to our IVF child, I brought home a red balloon. I tied a small card to it, and I told my wife that I would give up all naming rights to our adopted child if she would let me write the name of our lost child on the card. She said I could, and I wrote the name. We went into the back yard together, and after a while, we let it slip through our fingers and watched it drift away. It was a clear, windless day, and I watched it drift for what seemed like forever, and finally it was gone. We had let go of our dreams of a biological child.
The last document that we needed for the adoption arrived from the Chinese consulate in San Francisco on September 9th. And that same morning, my wife took a pregnancy test, because she was late, and it was positive. We believe that the conception happened less than two weeks after we let go of our hope.
Oni no Maggie, I am truly sorry that this has happened to you. A lot of us have been in the same place, and it sucks. I just wanted you to know that, even though the world is shit right now, you will come out of it. And sometimes, miracles do happen.
End note: We are still waiting for our Chinese daughter, three and a half years later, thanks to (very likely deliberate) slow-downs in the process. Having a biokid show up didn’t make us give up on our adopted child, even though it has meant going through multiple homestudy updates and refiling the paperwork with immigration three times. I’ve been asked why we haven’t given up, and my answer is, “I won’t, until I can write her a letter telling her why we’re not coming to pick her up, and I can’t do that.”