In a previous post I talked about our annual girls’ trip and my friend who is struggling to conceive. Her particular situation hits so close to home because she has endured the same questions from the same friends, is dealing with eerily similar issues such as fibroids and polyps, and like me, seems to be truly content with the decision to pursue adoption. One thing that she did say that made a lot of sense to me, but that I had never thought about is that she really, really regrets not attempting IVF right when it was recommended as essentially her only option by her RE.
Her initial consultation with her doctor took place over a year ago. She was finally able to convince her husband to get a sperm analysis and learned that in addition to her issues that she already knew about, her husband also had less than desirable counts and morphology. The news that her husband was contributing to their struggles and that the doctor advised that IVF was their best and maybe only option came as a bit of a shock to both of them and they needed time to determine what they wanted to do.
Time to think about it and devise a game plan turned into more than a year of putting it off and hoping that they would conceive on their own. Now, she has spent so much time thinking about the pros and cons of IVF and worrying about the pain, implications of a failed cycle, and the merits of building a family in other ways that she has talked herself out of going through with it. The IVF cycle has become a fear and a hurdle that in her state of anxiety and self-consciousness is very difficult to get over. She has convinced herself that there are children in need and that they are destined to be childless or to adopt a child who would otherwise be hard to place. The problem is that her husband wants to give IVF a shot and is not completely on board with adoption at this point.
Her psychological struggles make me appreciate how quickly my husband and I made the decision to pursue IVF. Once we really knew that it was not only our best but also likely our only option to conceive a child we put it on the calendar and started counting down the days. I know that if I had put it off initially and done the research and the soul searching and the pros and cons like she did I might still be waiting to adopt the baby that others deemed right for our family or miserably waiting to move forward in our journey. I think this is one of very few instances that I can think of that haste and impatience paid off!
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