In Search of Life (Part I)

Tomorrow is a very special day for me. Last year, the Monday before Thanksgiving is when I received the amazing news that I was pregnant. I've thought a lot about what parts of this journey I want to share. In sharing, I hope that another woman who may be struggling to conceive may come across my story and find hope. Because what I know best from my experience is that hope can be impossible to find and sometimes tales from the Internet are the only salve for an aching and isolated soul. I spent countless nights reading and re-reading message boards and blogs focused on infertility, to the point that I had memorized many women's stories even though I had no idea who these women were. During this week of Thanksgiving, I'll tell my story because I cannot think of another thing I am more thankful to have taken the chance on and more thankful to have found the doctors, faith and support people I needed to come out the other side.

In December of 2014, I decided that I was going to begin my journey to motherhood. I was 32 years old and confident my biggest obstacle would be sorting out how to choose a male donor. I did that over the next several months and commenced artificial insemination attempts in May of 2015. I went through three of those unsuccessfully then was told I would need surgery before proceeding with another attempt. In the midst of these attempts, I scoured the cryobank for different donors. Surely the issue was with the donor and not me. I was healthy, in shape and still young. After surgery, we waited another couple of months and attempted artificial insemination for a fourth time. Again unsuccessful. A fifth time. Again unsuccessful. At this point, I decided to move my medical care to Pittsburgh and see what could be discovered there.

I cannot say enough for the care that I received at Magee-Women's Hospital at the Center for Fertility and Reproductive Endocrinology--particularly from Dr. Marie Menke and her team. I had to basically start from scratch and go through some testing, then we attempted my sixth artificial insemination in May of 2016. When this attempt failed, I decided to take a break and re-evaluate. To this point, I did not want to try IVF. I didn't want to feed my body the hormones, and I didn't want to chance it with the price tag. (To this point, I'd already spent thousands of dollars.) If I were to remain with Dr. Menke, that would have to be the next step.

I decided adoption would be a better route for me. After all, I didn't have to rely on my unreliable body that way. However, I soon discovered the many obstacles and challenges of trying to adopt as an untraditional parent (untraditional being defined here as not married to a man). I recall a conversation I had with a lady at the recommended adoption agency in the state of WV. She basically listened to my story and let me know that they had a waiting list of (traditional) couples and that they likely would not be the best fit for me because of my "situation"--funny because I thought my only situation to this point was that I could not conceive. Needless to say, I felt transported back to the Stone Age. This meant moving out of state, and I started down the path with a national agency only to find that their $13K price tag would only cover the very beginning of their search for me and each year that passed would carry more cost for the search to continue. I researched the foster care system but knew, living alone, I was not well equipped to handle any special needs situations. Unfortunately, many many of the foster to adopt opportunities include those due to skyrocketing drug and alcohol use. This suddenly seemed like the worse of the two options and my unreliable body started to seem more promising.