Searching for Answers- Finding Roadblocks

We did not have 12 thousand dollars, and with me in school full time, I could not even imagine when we would possibly have this much money to invest in a treatment that wasn't even a guarantee.  We also battled with ethical concerns about the process of IVF, and we had some worries about the harsh toll it would take on my body.  We wanted to make certain that we did all of our research before we made any definite decisions.


I researched domestic and international adoption.  Whenever I asked about the average price and time on an adoption, the answer rarely varied, "It's at least a year from your completed home study, and it will cost you at least 20 thousand dollars."  Some international agencies even went up to 35K!  I was appalled and heart broken at the same time.  Twenty thousand dollars???? Where in the world is all that money going to?  How could it cost so much just to match an orphan with a loving home?


While doing our research we also looked into embryo adoption. (This is basically when other couples do IVF and they have embryo's left over, they will sometimes donate them to other families who can't have children of their own.)  This seemed like a very real option for us because we were open to adoption, but we also wanted to have the experience of pregnancy, and we also loved the idea of being able to protect our baby from the womb.  The cost of an embryo adoption was only around 4K, which we felt was a lot more plausible for us to come up with compared to the 12K that it would cost for IVF or 20K+ for an adoption.  I started to call local clinics to find out if they had any embryo's available for adoption, and the responses were always either "We don't have any embryos available," or "We only adopt our embryos out to families who have undergone at least one round of IVF."  I grew more and more frustrated with every call, by the time I got to the last clinic and the nurse on the phone gave me her version of "response number two," I couldn't take it any more.  I almost cried into the phone when I said to her "So, basically you are telling me that we can't have children unless we have at least 12 thousand dollars."  I think I caught the nurse off guard because she never replied to my question, she just squeaked out a half hearted "I'm sorry."  I somehow managed a "thank you for your time" before I slammed down the phone and burst into tears.


It felt like a death sentence for our family, and we felt as if we were completely boxed in with no real tangible options open to us, at least in the foreseeable future.  We couldn't get pregnant on our own, we couldn't afford IVF, we couldn't afford adoption, and we couldn't find any available embryos for an embryo adoption.  We wanted children desperately and this cycle of roadblocks was so maddening.  We tried to comfort ourselves in the hope that, with the job that I could get after I graduated, we would be able to save enough for one of the above options, but, in reality, these dreams seemed so far away and we were ready for children yesterday.


December of 2009 was absolutely miserable for both of us.  There were days when I felt like a zombie walking around- completely in a daze- unable to think of anything else except for the family that I couldn't have and the children that were just beyond my reach.  I know that Judah felt the same thing.  There was this tangible uncertainty between us where our future as a family hung so delicately in front of our eyes.  We were afraid to hope for fear that everything would come crashing down again and so we tiptoed in the quiet loneliness of our house, refusing to talk about children or our plans for the future.


However, we quickly learned that living without hope, is not really living at all.