We are already in the second week of sharing testimonies for pregnancy and infant loss awareness month. The testimony today is from a sweet sweet couple that endured so much! I am thankful to call this wonderful woman my friend! She is also a prayer warrior for Brandon and I, and I got to be the same for her during her adoption process! Please take the time to read her story! Here is my friend and her husband's story...
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My husband and I got married in October 2010. We both had always planned to have children. So, after one year of marriage, we began trying to conceive. After 6 months of failing to conceive naturally, I started taking an oral fertility drug and after 6 more months of no success, we went to the ART Fertility Clinic. Over the next 4 years, we endured 5 unsuccessful IUIs, 3 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, 1 unsuccessful round of egg donation, 1 unsuccessful round of embryo donation, every type of testing you can imagine (including hormone and genetic testing), and 3 miscarriages. I endured hundreds of fertility-drug injections, dozens of ultrasounds, a laparoscopic surgery, 2 hysteroscopies, and I had my blood drawn too many times to count. We spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket. At the end of that process, 4 Reproductive Endocrinologists, who each had been in this field for many years, couldn't tell us specifically why we couldn't have biological children, and they couldn't remember anybody else doing as much as we had done (basically everything that's available) and, at the end, neither having a baby nor knowing the specific problem. Neither of us has any "missing parts" or anything else wrong that any kind of testing can reveal. The doctors thought that the problem might be "egg quality" and bad luck, but they didn't know for sure. During the IVF treatments, fertilization was never a problem, but the embryos just inexplicably never could survive. We know several other people who have used ART and have been successful. We think the doctors and staff at ART did all they could for us, and we are grateful for their help, but ultimately it just didn’t work out. In the end, even our fertility doctor recommended that we pursue adoption. So, in September 2016, we decided to adopt and started the process.
The adoption process also isn't easy or cheap, but it ended up going much quicker than our infertility process. We were matched in January 2017, and then on March 27, 2017 (my husband's 40th birthday), God blessed us with our daughter. We got the call on March 26 that the birth mom was in labor in Tennessee, and we were fortunate enough to be able to make it to the hospital for the birth. I was even invited to be in the delivery room and got to cut the cord! My husband joined our daughter and I very shortly thereafter in the hospital nursery, and we had the opportunity to be with her and to take care of her continuously from then on. Due to exposure to opiates in utero, our daughter experienced withdrawal symptoms and was transferred from the hospital where she was born to the NICU at East TN Children’s Hospital where she was treated for 13 days. We were with her the whole time in both hospitals. She was born completely healthy otherwise, and when she was discharged from Children’s on April 12, she was completely over the withdrawal symptoms, doing great, and the doctors told us that there shouldn’t be any long-term effects. We then were finally able to travel back home with our daughter, after living in Tennessee for the first 23 days of her life. We had custody of her since her birth, we then became her guardians, and less than 3 months after her birth, we were able to finalize her adoption! She is the child we prayed for over 5+ years. For all those years, we tried not to complain publicly about our problems, even though our attempt to have a child affected almost every day of our lives in some way for 5+ years. We wanted to wait for a happy ending, and the Lord blessed us with a very happy one!
Our daughter was such a huge blessing and we loved our first adoption so much that we decided to do it again. We began the process in October 2019. Shortly thereafter, the COVID pandemic hit and slowed the process down a little bit, but in July 2020, we were matched with a married couple who was very early in pregnancy and who wanted to place their child for adoption. Fortunately, we were able to be in contact with the birth parents throughout pretty much the entire pregnancy. We were even able to be present for the gender ultrasound back in October 2020. The birth mother invited me to be in the room with her when we found out that IT'S A BOY! On February 25, 2021, our precious son was born in Ohio! We lived in a hotel with him there in Ohio for 2 weeks. We had physical custody of him since birth, gained legal custody of him a few days later, and were cleared to bring him home two weeks after his birth. We just finalized his adoption last month.
We are grateful to our son's birth parents for being so great to work with throughout the adoption process, for taking such great care of our son in utero, and for choosing life! When we met the birth parents face-to-face for the first time and had dinner with them back in October of 2020, the birth father told us that when he found out that his wife was pregnant, he initially wanted her to have an abortion but that she wanted to "look into" adoption. Then, he said, after meeting us and seeing that the baby would be taken care of, he was glad that they chose to pursue adoption. I think this situation shows that everyone's mind is not made up concerning whether to have an abortion. In some situations, people are willing to look into alternatives to abortion, and if viable alternatives to abortion, like adoption, exist, they are willing to pursue those alternatives. Of course, that requires having people who are willing to adopt.
Adoption has TREMENDOUSLY blessed our lives TWICE! We are thankul for everyone who helped us throughout both of our adoptions! These individuals include our entire adoption team (our adoption consultants, our social worker, and our attorneys and their staffs). We are also grateful for all our family and great friends who supported us throughout both adoptions! Most of all, we thank God for giving us two precious gifts, our daughter and our son! The adoption process is neither easy nor cheap, but the blessing received at the end of the process is unbelievable!
