Here it is!
Evan and I were married on November 18th, 2016, 3 days shy of our 6 year anniversary. It was one of the best days of our lives! We were so excited to start our next chapter in life as a married couple. We had so many plans and goals. As soon as we were married, we decided it was time to start seeing more of the world. We booked a beautiful honeymoon to St. Lucia, a trip to Disney World and Harry Potter World (we really wanted to do this trip at least once without children), and a cruise through the Norwegian Fjords! That last one is a bit unusual for couples our age (we were basically the youngest people on the ship!) but it was absolutely the most adventurous, coolest trip we took! It was during this trip we began TTC. We thought, “how cool would it be to conceive on such an amazing journey!?”
During our trip to Norway, we knew we wanted to start trying. We avoided alcohol entirely, cut back significantly on caffeine, and kept our diets in check (which really wasn’t much of a change for us considering we are so passionate about wellness). We were both so healthy, with the exception of a few minor issues I had a few years back. We had no idea the struggle we were about to encounter.
When we returned from Europe, we couldn’t wait to see if we had conceived! We completely understood that conceiving on the first try is way harder than high school health class leads you to believe, but we were so hopeful! We couldn’t wait for the two week wait (TWW) to pass. When it finally did, I took my first pregnancy test, but we were sadly disappointed. At that exact moment, this overwhelming feeling of dread came over me that told me this was going to be hard for us. I broke down in tears, not just because I wasn’t pregnant, but because I just knew something was wrong.
A few months have passed by along with a few dozen pregnancy tests. Yes, I absolutely had POAS syndrome (pee on a stick). We were doing everything we possibly could to increase our chances of getting pregnant. I used ovulation tests every day of the month, I invested in the Ava bracelet, I tracked my cycles on about 5 different apps, we used the SMEP (sperm meets egg plan), took fertility supplements, drank Pomegranate juice daily, and prayed and prayed and prayed. Still nothing.
Normally, OBGYN’s don’t refer patients to a fertility specialist until after a year of trying to conceive naturally. However, my doctor knew of my previous issues (many of which required surgeries) so she referred us after 6 months. The clinic we used was South Jersey Fertility Center. Evan and I each underwent a series of tests to determine if there was an underlying problem. The tests included multiple rounds of bloodwork (I have a pathological fear of needles so this was extremely difficult for me), exams, and a semen analysis. The results took a few weeks to come back so meanwhile we just waited.
Oh the wait.
After what felt like an eternity, we finally got our results back for my tests. As it turns out, despite my past issues, I was completely healthy! This was both good and bad news. One the one hand, YAY! No issues! On the other, what the heck is wrong? It surely can’t be a problem with the man because that’s not a thing. Do we have unexplained infertility? Will we never know what’s wrong?
So we continued TTC because we didn’t think anything could be wrong with the man. A couple days later, we got the call. The results were in and it turns out our issue was, in fact, male factor.
*I don’t want to go into the specifics of our diagnosis publicly for 2 reasons: 1. Not my body, not my place! 2. Whether our issue turned out to be physically mine, Evan’s, or both of ours, we are in this together forever and therefore any issue one of us has, we take it together! So from now on, you will hear (or read) me refer to the diagnosis as our diagnosis.
When we got our diagnosis we were absolutely crushed. We felt so blindsided and shocked and suddenly VERY alone in the world. Our doctor said what we are dealing with is incredibly rare and she’s never seen anything like it. This made us feel even more isolated. We were transferred to another specialist to figure out what is causing our issue and if it is fixable. We went through even more testing, some of which took months to complete. During all this time, there were more mental breakdowns than I can count. As a result, my fitness took a hit and I just didn’t care about my health, physical or mental. I stopped maintaining a healthy daily diet and indulged more than I should have in the good stuff. However, one benefit did come from my suffering at this point: we ran away.
To help us cope, we started taking trips again. A friend of ours got married out in California so we saw this as an opportunity to take a vacation. We explored Los Angeles and had a blast! After this, we hopped on a plane to Miami and got on a cruise to Key West and Mexico. We went power snorkeling for the first time in Mexico which was so cool! On this trip, we did nothing but relax and have fun, something we hadn’t done in months. We had great food, tasty drinks, and got A LOT of sun! Every time we got on a plane, our troubles stayed at the gate and were waiting for us when we got back. The few days we were gone were, thankfully, filled with peace.
Once we returned from our cruise, we got the phone call with the results from our tests. To make this part short, we were told our only hope was to have an invasive surgery to give us a shot at successfully going through IVF. Unfortunately, we couldn’t get a surgery date until months later, so we were back to playing the waiting game for a while. During this wait, I booked a surprise trip back to Disney and Harry Potter World! (I made Evan a surprise box with a Disney t shirt, a Ravenclaw t shirt, and laminated Disney and Hogwarts tickets and then gave it to him once the trip was finalized). I scheduled it for after our surgery so we would have something to look forward to in the event the surgery didn’t yield the results we were hoping for. As it turned out, this was a smart move because the surgery determined we would never have children together.
We were rocked to the core at this news. Our RE had told us earlier that there are very few issues that can’t be fixed, yet here we are with an unfixable issue.
How was it possible that we weren’t meant to have children? Why is this happening to us? It felt like a nightmare that would never end. We didn’t know what to do. We were absolutely devastated and needed to grieve. We cried. I screamed. We cut ourselves off from basically everyone by this point.
My way of coping was throwing myself into research. I knew I was meant to be a mother and Evan a father. Now the question was, “how are we going to do this?” At this point, our only options were adoption which is unbelievably expensive, can take years to be matched, and wouldn’t give us the experience of pregnancy, or use donor cells. Neither of us were completely comfortable with the idea of using donor cells. We were afraid of a barrier forming within our marriage if our baby was biologically related to one of us and not the other. We are also hesitant about the cost and wait involved with adoption. We were so ready for our baby now and the possibility of never experiencing pregnancy plunged me into a deep depression.
I want to make very clear than nothing, I repeat, *NOTHING* is wrong with either of these paths to parenthood. One of my best friend’s used a donor and she and her husband are now blessed with a perfect son and they are very happy! Also, a few of my friends have pursued adoption successfully and another couple is currently pursuing it, all of whom have BEAUTIFUL families! We just didn’t feel in our hearts that either of these paths were our way into parenthood, though they seemed like the only ways at the time so we came up with an arrangement: we would begin the adoption process and if we weren’t matched by the time we were 29, we would revisit the idea of using donor cells. We weren’t “happy” with the plan, but at least we had a plan.
A few days after making our decision, I was driving to work thinking it all over. I was just about out of my development when it hit me. If you can get donor eggs and donor sperm, why can’t you get a donor embryo? I called my husband from the car and the only two words I spoke to him were “embryo adoption!” We didn’t even know if this was a thing. I thought I was making it up. He said he was hanging up to see if this was, in fact, a thing and would call me back. My 5 minute commute to work felt like 5 hours, but the whole time, something inside me was telling me this was it. I pulled into the parking lot at work when Evan called me back and said, “let’s do it.”
All of a sudden, everything changed. I smiled for the first time in months. I felt so good about this. The question was now, “how do we do this?” It turns out there are 2 ways to go about embryo adoption, but I’ll talk more about that in another post! As we researched further, we found that South Jersey Fertility Center actually has an embryo donation program which means not only could we have a shot at pregnancy, but we didn’t even have to switch doctors! It really seemed like this was meant to be for us. We made a consultation appointment immediately and before we knew it, we were on the fast track to adopting our embryos! We were given a folder of portfolios so we could choose our donors and briefed on the protocols to follow. Again, I will document this whole process in a separate post! Within 2 months, we chose our donors, adopted two embryos, prepared my body for the transfer, and by some miracle, our perfect, beautiful Maerynne Rose Weatherby was growing inside me.
So this is our story of infertility and our beautiful, albeit unusual, path to finding parenthood. There were moments of immense pain and sorrow, but I wouldn’t change it for the world. Because of what we went through, we have our PERFECT daughter. She is everything I dreamed she’d be and so much more.
The Infertile Journal 