The Leap

The truth of the matter is this: my broken reproductive system has not been the largest bump in the road towards building a family. The real pothole for us has been money. In 28 months, we've completed only six cycles of treatment (4 IUIs, 1 IVF, 1 FET). Six cycles... it's not a lot. I have friends who have completed six fresh IVF cycles in less time than that. But for us, money (or the lack of) has created long pauses in the process as every step along the way has seemed insurmountable. And the costs we have covered so far, though large, is still only a fraction of the cost of our adoption. Over the years, anytime one of us brought up adoption, I would quickly become overwhelmed by the dollar signs and string of zeros and shelve the thought once more.

When Sam and I first heard that fertility treatments were recommended for us, it was May 2012. Sam was entering his final semester of classroom hours before his clinical rotations began. I was working full time, carrying our health insurance, and paying as many bills as I possibly could with my tiny, little paycheck. We were getting by, but we were in no way prepared to spend $1,500 on ONE chance at pregnancy. It was mind boggling: "I'm sorry, you want us to pay how much to take a few pills and shove some washed sperm inside me?" I couldn't fathom how we could come up with that kind of cash. At the time, with an unexplained infertility diagnosis, an IUI gave us about a 20% chance of success... we were shocked and overwhelmed by the numbers. We would need to pay approximately $1,500 for ONE SHOT at conception and the odds would only be the same as a normal fertile couple our age.

It was overwhelming and incredibly difficult to come up with the funds, but we did it... three times because we knew the other option was truly HUGE. Imagine our dismay when November 2012 rolled around... we were still living with my mom, with no income, and a bank account that had been decimated by three back to back IUI cycles... and we were still not pregnant. We then had an exceptionally special conversation with our Reproductive Endocrinologist where really fun things like IVF were discussed at the low-low price tag of $15,000. $1,500 had seemed like an impossible feat just a few months ago... $15,000 might as well have been 15 million to us. We couldn't imagine a time when we would have that sort of money. For us, we slammed straight into a brick wall after those three IUIs. Where many couples proceed straight onto IVF, we were forced to stop and wait for fourteen months.

At every step along the way, we have discussed adoption, but the price tag has always seemed impossible. If IUIs proved daunting at $1,500 a piece, how could we ever afford an adoption? If it took us 14 months to pay for IVF, how long would it take to fund an adoption? Fertility treatments, though incredibly expensive, have proven the faster and cheaper route for us to build our family at every intersection along this road, so we have continuously chosen that route. For the longest time, I believed that adoption was the final chapter to our family building story, not only because that is what I have seen modeled, but also because I assumed (and hoped) that adoption would be easier financially in a different season of life. And that is probably true... in five years we will have gone from $160,000 in student loan debt to less than $75,000, even if we only make minimum payments until then. There is no doubt that life will look vastly different when we can stop paying $1,700 a month in student loans. We certainly hope to return to adoption again in several years to add to our family, but we also don't want our current financial situation to limit our potential for a family right now. 

My head has feared adoption for the numbers. My pride has kept me from asking for help throughout our family building journey. I admittedly have issues accepting gifts (even though gifts are my love language) and I hate feeling like I owe people. But countless friends have reminded me that our faith has the most potential to grow when we leap and trust that God will provide. It is our inability to complete the task on our own that allows the Lord the room to show up in a mighty way. So that's exactly what we're doing... we're leaping and asking the Lord to provide.

The truth is we absolutely cannot fund this adoption on our own... not in the time frame we've been given.  We can certainly contribute, and we intend to do so on a monthly basis just like we did with IVF, but we can't do this alone. So we are squashing our pride, saying our prayers, and leaping with eyes wide open asking for assistance to bring home Baby Greavu.

If you would like to support Operation: Bring Home Baby Greavu, please look for tomorrow's post on donation opportunities and other ways you can help.