I’ve hesitated to share our story because it doesn’t have the typical happy ending, but I’m sharing because that’s just a part of the infertility reality.
When we got married, we wanted five kids and started trying right away. It took two years before we realized something might not be right, but we didn’t have the funds or the mental capacity to chase it down right away so we focused on our finances. By year four we were ready to try anything to have a baby, but fertility treatments were far more expensive than adoption through our church and so we decided to try infant adoption first. After two years of trying to find our baby through that avenue with zero success (or hope), we opted to start mild treatments and do them simultaneously. For the next two years, we did 9 rounds of Clomid, (which made me a crazy pants, quite literally) and had 4 failed IUIs, we were told IVF was our only other option and that we had less than 3% chance of conceiving naturally. Having spent 4 years trying to adopt, and 2 years of fertility treatments in our 8 years of marriage, we accepted that we were just going to be childless. We had already paid our final home study fee and opted to just let the year ride out and got to work building a better life for the two of us.
We started school again, hoping to finish our Bachelor’s degrees and started planning to move to a bigger city, but just 3 weeks after our first semester started, we got a call about a 9 month old baby boy with Down syndrome who was currently in foster care and available for adoption. We moved forward with that adoption and brought Owen home at 10 months old. He would remain in foster care, in our home, for the next 8 months before the adoption was finalized. 3 months before our adoption was finalized, I found out I was pregnant with a baby girl, Alexis. Even the doctor was surprised! We went from 0 children to two in 13 months. We settled into our new life and assumed that because I got pregnant once, it would happen again. It did, 2 years later, but ended in a miscarriage. I remember during the hard years, I always just wished I could get pregnant, even if it ended in a miscarriage just so I could know that my body would work, that was dumb, because the miscarriage was one of the hardest things I’ve gone through in my life. 3 more years passed, and this last summer, when the kids were 4 and 6, we decided we had to try one last time. We have been married for 14 years, are getting older, and frankly the window is closing. We started three rounds of Letrazole in July with no success and started our first IVF cycle the week of Thanksgiving. My body had a hard time with the medication and although I had a lot of follicles, the growth was extremely slow. My progesterone levels started rising rapidly and after 13 days of stim meds, we had to move forward with what we had. By egg retrieval day, we found that I had already ovulated (not a mismanagement of meds, but rather my progesterone levels being too high) and we lost half of our expected 16 eggs. The following day, we got even more devastating news when we learned that 4 of the eggs were immature, 2 didn’t fertilize, and the 2 that did had malformation’s indicating an egg issue and they never made it to blastocysts. We were told we could try again, but that we’d likely have to use an egg donor. We are now five weeks out from that cycle and we just have peace. We have two wonderful children, and although the pain and hurt of infertility will never fade, we know that we have done everything we can do and so there is no regret. That’s why our story is significant. The journey is hard. The journey is painful. The journey sometimes brings wonderful blessings, and other times ends in sadness, but the journey above all is worth it. No regrets. Move forward. Fight for your baby and then find peace in whatever hand you have been dealt.
I’ve included some pictures of our family, and from our recent IVF cycle. I found the sign, 3 hours after learning all of our eggs were gone and it now hangs in my house where I see it multiple times a day.
Instagram: @bagropp
Facebook: Brittnee Freeman Gropp
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