Miss Truvy, I promise that my personal tragedy will not interfere with my ability to do good hair.

There are just so many good quotes from this movie!  I had to list some of my favorites:

1. "I've just been to the dedication of the new children's park."
"Yeah, how did that go?"
"Janice Van Meter got hit with a baseball. It was fabulous."
"Was she hurt?"
"I doubt it. She got hit in the head."

2. "Well, you know what they say: if you don't have anything nice to say about anybody, come sit by me!"

3. "I'm just screamin' at my husband; I can do that any time!"

4. "I have a strict policy that nobody cries alone in my presence."

5. "Clairee, you know I’d rather walk on my lips than criticize anybody...but...Janice Van Meter…"
"I know... "
"I bet you money she’s paid $500 for that dress and doesn’t even bother to wear a girdle."
"It’s like two pigs fighting under a blanket."

Ok, there is another quote from this movie that makes more sense as the title to this post, but it wasn't as funny. I actually didn't want to post this story at all because it's really not very funny and I like my blog posts to be light and fun and not really serious. Because who wants to be sad after reading a friend's blog? Anyway, since we have been giving our blog address out to some prospective birth moms, I decided I should write about my experiences leading up to adoption. WARNING: this post is going to be pretty lengthy with NO pictures. If you don't want to read it, I won't be offended. Also, I don't want anyone to be sad reading this. It's a rule, I just made it, and I expect you to follow my rules. So here we go: the somewhat lengthy story of my infertility.

When Josh and I got married in 2003 we were really poor, so we decided to wait to start our family. So, after a year we decided to try to get pregnant. After about a year of trying with no results, I started tracking my basal body temperature every morning. After a few months of tracking my temperature, I became pregnant. From the beginning, I knew something was wrong. I can’t really explain it, but I just didn’t feel right. I miscarried at about 7 weeks. My doctor assured me that it was very common for women to miscarry their first pregnancy and that everything still looked fine. Then, about six weeks later I ended up in the emergency room with really bad stomach cramps. I thought my appendix had burst. It turns out I had some ovarian cysts that were rupturing. As a formality, the ER nurse took my blood to check for pregnancy. The ER doctor told me I was pregnant, but considering the pain I was in and the rupturing cysts, he wanted me to see my OB/GYN. Two days later I was in the OB/GYN’s office and he confirmed that I miscarried again. After that, we were never able to get pregnant again without fertility treatments. Josh was finishing school, and we still didn’t have very much money. Fertility treatments are very expensive, and our insurance didn’t cover anything regarding infertility. So we decided to wait again.

Josh graduated in 2006, got hired by the border patrol and in the spring of 2007 we moved to Arizona. In the fall of 2007 we started the infertility treatments with a specialist. We still didn’t know what was “wrong” at this point. All of the tests came back normal. We did Intra-Uterine Insemination (IUI) three times with no success. At this point, the specialist recommended In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF). He said with IVF, people with unexplained infertility sometimes get pregnant, sometimes get answers, and sometimes get both. We saved for months, and did the procedure in the spring of 2008. As a result of the procedure, the doctor discovered that my eggs had a problem. I don’t remember the medical terms, but basically the eggs are slow. They don’t develop at the normal rate that an egg should when it is fertilized. They retrieved 21 eggs during the procedure. Out of those 21 eggs, only twelve survived the retrieval. The lab fertilized all 12 eggs. By the time the embryos were ready for the transfer, only three were left. They were all considered “poor” quality embryos. At implantation, we were given a 20% chance of success. We waited for two weeks, I took a blood test, and it worked! We were so excited! I was taking hormone injections to mimic what a woman’s body normally does when pregnant, and kept that up for a few more weeks. Because of the infertility, our first ultrasound would be around 8 weeks. About a week before our appointment, I got mild stomach cramps and a little bleeding. My doctor didn’t seem to think that was uncommon, and just advised me to take it easy. When we went to the ultrasound appointment, the doctor told us there wasn’t a baby anymore.

That was probably the rock bottom of this whole situation for me.  Besides the sadness, I felt a lot of guilt: for spending so much money on something and not having any results, for getting others excited for no reason, for causing other people pain. It was crappy; let’s leave it at that. Anyway, after a few months we decided to do IVF again with an egg donor. We looked at the donors who worked with our doctor, but in the end decided to go with one of my sisters. She came in the spring of 2009 and we had a party for a month while she was here. What a trooper! She went through all of these awful tests and procedures. I had been through them all, but it was a price I was willing to pay because I wanted a baby so badly. I just can’t believe that she would do them all so I could have a baby. She is great (HUGE understatement)! Anyway, things looked successful and everything was set. I was sure it would work this time, since these embryos were healthy. But, after waiting the two weeks again, I had my blood drawn and I wasn’t pregnant. I handled this blow a little better. But I still felt the guilt. And now I had dragged my sister into the mess. I felt so bad for her, because she had put her life on hold and sacrificed so much for nothing. But we did have a fabulous time together, and we will always have that.

So at this point, I was exhausted: physically, mentally, emotionally, and (probably most important) financially. Anything we did after this was just going to be more expensive. It took me a few months to really give up on having our own baby, being pregnant, and everything that comes with that. Sometime in the fall of 2009 I decided to let it all go and Josh and I started talking about adoption again. We had met with a caseworker at the beginning of 2009 and we really did not have a good feeling about adoption. I wasn’t sure why at the time. Now I think it was because of the timing. But for whatever reason, it made us hesitant to go down that road again. We considered going to an agency other than LDS Family Services, but in the end decided to meet with them because there was a new caseworker for our area and we needed to get a home study done. LDS Family Services does home studies relatively inexpensively and they let you have the info if you want to work with another agency.

At the beginning of summer, we met Hannah, our caseworker. We LOVE her. She is so great at her job and puts so much effort into taking care of her clients. She helped us through the paperwork and legal processes quickly, and we were ready to go two months later. We are excited about adoption and feel good about what is happening with it. I don’t know why it happened like this, but I know both Josh and I feel like adoption is the right thing for us to do now. It’s an interesting and complicated situation, and there are moments where I don’t know what to think. But I know the Lord is watching and good things are happening because of His plan for all the people involved in the adoption process.

So that's it. It’s amazing to me that I can put the last six years and one of my biggest trials into less than two pages of writing. Kudos to you if you made it through this. And remember my rule: No sadness. Because as Clairee said, "That which does not kill us, makes us stronger."