Part One: From Despair to Wonder
Three years into our marriage after we had checked off many of the items from our list of “Goals to Achieve Before Beginning a Family” we decided that it was time to dig in. We had just experienced a life changing experience and wanted to celebrate: The gift of life, that we now knew to deeply cherish. I was in a bad car accident. I was stopped at a stop sign in the passenger seat of my mother’s car, on the way to her birthday celebration. I had taken off my seat belt to pass around the take-out we had just stopped to get and we were rear ended by someone speeding down Lyndale Ave, never even breaking. Without the seat belt to hold me in my face went through the windshield of the car. 9 ½ hours of reconstructive surgery later, I had a stroke in the recovery room. No one could figure out if it was the swelling from the bleeding causing pressure on my brain. It was the first in a line of medical oddities that wouldn’t be solved for years. What we knew now was that I needed to heal from the reconstruction and then diagnose the underlying cause of the stroke. Recovering from the reconstruction involved 6 months of a liquid diet, a year of painful physical therapy and a deeper need to understand why this had happened. As I slowly dealt with and healed from the facial reconstruction, we began to see how blessed our life was and decided that it was time to embrace the opportunity to have children. A year into my healing we still hadn’t found success and sought out help from a physician specializing in infertility. Looking back now I realize that first day meeting Cheryl, would change our lives, and hers, in more ways that we could even comprehend at the time.
For anyone who has traveled down the road of infertility, you are aware of the frustration, anger, sadness, and desperation that you experience as month after month passes without success. While we watched many friends and family members successfully have children, we felt torn by our happiness at their success and our confusion as to why we weren’t achieving what seemed so easy for so many others. During the 3 years that we were trying to have a baby I was also serving on the Child Abuse Council for our county and was daily watching the horror of families who were striking out in anger at their beautiful children. Embracing the violence of a violent society and not appreciating the precious gift that they were raising each day. Watching these little lives being forgotten and abused, made our inability to have babies seem all the more painful and damaging. A year and a half into our battle with infertility we decided to complete a long stream of tests to help better understand the origin of the problem. The tests were slow, painful, embarrassing and often inconclusive. We tried to see the light side and laugh about the crazy things the medical community wants you to do; between taking your temperature, changing your choice of underwear, to scheduling your intercourse. We found it ironic that after aggressively trying not to get pregnant in the early years of our marriage we had now come to find out that it was all for naught. We could have been willy nilly and would never have needed to worry. Hindsight is often ironic like that. When the tests were completed in mid-December of that year, just as the holidays were keying up, a time of family, hope and child-like wonder. We sat in a doctor’s office to learn coming to terms with the discovery that: I had scar tissue in my uterus because of endometritis coupled with the fact that I was not ovulating routinely the final determination was: We would never have children of our own. Oh and by the way..I needed to have surgery to attempt to clear away some of the scar tissue to open up the blocked tubes that were found on my hysterosalpingogram. Merry Christmas! We were devastated. After so many years of trying, false hope and failure, in the season of birth and joy, we learned that we would never have children of our own. That Christmas was a time of utter sorrow and anger for us.
