I don’t really know where to begin with this to be honest. It’s been quite the summer, and not for the reasons you might think. There has been all of that of course but there have been other things too. We found out in June that one of our blastocysts from our round of IVF in February hadn’t actually failed the test to see if it was viable for transfer. Three had failed, but one just had a ‘no result’ which hadn’t been explained to me – I’d thought that it meant that it wasn’t viable, especially as the embryologist I spoke to just kept apologising to me. Apparently it just means they don’t know what it’s like and it’s started to hatch so they can’t perform another test on it. So we have a blasto in a freezer somewhere that we need to decide what to do with. Sadly it’s more a financial decision as the clinic put their prices up in April but it’s definitely something we’re considering when it’s safe to do so.
Then there’s adoption. That had started to become a serious consideration when I still didn’t fall pregnant over the summer. We both made significant lifestyle changes, neither of us were commuting across London anymore and my usual May/June of 12+ hour working days and high stress levels didn’t happen. And yet I still didn’t fall. If it wasn’t going to happen under those circumstances then when will it?! It was becoming clear that although there is (allegedly) nothing wrong with either of us the mix of our genes just doesn’t produce a viable embryo, for reasons we will never know and I’m guessing no one would be able to tell us. I’d been using ovulation apps (still am) and we have essentially been home inseminating due to issues we’ve been having (all that glorious detail here) so I’m of course paranoid that that’s gone wrong somewhere but I’m aware of other people who it has absolutely worked for so who knows. As the months passed, the more adoption seemed like the way we'd complete our family.
We'd both been very interested in adoption at earlier stages of our infertility journey, we knew we had so much love to give and wanted to give that love to a child in need of it. So, we signed up for an information session with the adoption service in our area. It would normally have been in person of course, but not in current circumstances. It was two hours long and incredibly comprehensive, two lovely woman from the adoption service itself as well as a woman who had adopted a child in the last couple of years so had real recent experience of the process. It was incredibly eye opening and we'd realised we'd been very VERY naïve. We had been under the impression that a child we could adopt would be relinquished, unwanted by their own family, however it turns out the children are very much wanted by their families but are removed by the courts. Sometimes the removal is fought by relatives, sometimes the child is removed even though siblings are allowed to stay. I'm sure the courts have reasons for taking children away, I'm sure they're doing it for good reasons but that just doesn't sit comfortably with us. I don't want to tear apart another family just to get my own family. I know people here have adopted, I know it's worked for them, I do not want the words I am using to be hurtful. That would be the absolute last thing I would want. But we are where we are. It turns out that adoption, in our area of the UK at least, isn't what we thought it was and therefore we don't think it's for us after all.
So the realisation has hit us lately that this might be it. It may well be just the two of us. We've talked about another round of IVF (a friend has very generously and very sweetly offered us a loan of the money so we wouldn't need to go through the bank again), we've talked about continuing home insemination. But realistically there is no guarantee either would work - neither has yet.
