For much of the past nearly sixteen years of marriage, seeing a picture of a baby like this one would have conjured up some very intense emotions inside of me and my dear wife Christine because we have long desired to have a baby to call our own. Seeing people all around us having children like it was nothing, enduring difficult days at church when mothers and fathers are celebrated on their special annual days, and just that empty longing to be the mommy and daddy to some precious little one made this time of long suffering that much more agonizing. Unless you’ve gone through the unique pain of trying, trying, and trying some more to have a baby only to be left continually frustrated (and childless) in the end, you have no idea what going through something like this feels like. It hurts…deeper than you can ever imagine.
We held off on having children for the first few years of our marriage that began on August 5, 1995 while I finished graduate school. When I dropped out with only a few courses left (I eventually went back and got my Master’s Degree in 2002), I worked at several retail and customer service type jobs before eventually landing some management and marketing-type positions. It was at this point when my income was able to support a family that we started trying in earnest. We did the whole ovulation cycle counting thing timing everything up perfectly for a long time. Each time we tried we thought through what we could have done differently–but nothing made a difference.
In 2007, we drove to Missouri to visit some friends of ours and one of them happened to be a reproductive endocrinologist. He agreed to take a look at us to see if he could help us get pregnant. We discovered Christine had endometriosis (which can inhibit the ability to get pregnant) and that the quality of my sperm was poor. There was some question about Christine’s egg quality and her age at the time (34) made that much more significant. After she healed from the endometriosis surgery, we decided to give a specialized version of in-vitro fertilization a try called IVF/ICSI. We had debated whether to do IVF or adoption and there was quite the feedback from my readers about it on both sides. Ultimately, we decided to give IVF/ICSI the old college try in December 2007. Christine endured lots of painful shots and more in our pursuit of a baby. After playing the waiting game to see if we got pregnant, the verdict came back just before Christmas that year: NOT PREGNANT!
Needless to say, we were devastated because we were virtually GUARANTEED to have a biological baby of our own the way it was marketed to us. The fact that it cost us $17,000 out of pocket didn’t help either since there was no baby to show for it. I often tell people that I lost my wife in 2008. She was alert and going through the motions of life, but she was emotionally and spiritually drained to the point that I couldn’t do anything to help her grieve this loss and move on. Despite this very dark time in our marriage, something pretty miraculous happened–we actually started growing closer as a couple. It’s amazing how the Lord used such a disappointing circumstance and created a positive in our lives from it. This helped us make a fateful decision when the opportunity arose in early 2011 for us to try one final time to get pregnant.
My wife’s sister Jennifer came into some money in 2010 and she had watched us try unsuccessfully to start a family since the day we said “I do” to each other. It pained her to see us going through this when she herself had the privilege to give birth to a beautiful little girl who is the pride and joy of her life. Jennifer so desperately wanted that for us too. So in January 2011, she called Christine and agreed to pay for us to go through fertility treatments again. Since we knew IVF was probably not a good option with my poor sperm quality and Christine’s poor egg quality, we started looking at other options. We came across the concept of embryo adoption where another man and woman donate their sperm and egg to be fertilized and frozen for use by couples like us who can’t get pregnant on our own. The cost of this was significantly less expensive than IVF, too–just $7500. It still wasn’t cheap, but it was manageable enough that Jennifer was willing to help us do this. Without her generous and loving heart, we never would have been able to try this.
After a few hits and misses trying to find the right match for who we adopt the embryo from (we get a few demographics about the donors in a profile page), we finally decided on one and started Christine on the shots beginning on March 31, 2011. We ran into a few snags along the way where Christine’s estrogen levels weren’t being suppressed enough on the Lupron, the emergence of an ovarian cyst that came out of nowhere, and other such stressful stuff that made this an “on again, off again” proposition. You can experience what all of that was like by watching our series of YouTube videos chronicling various days of our embryo adoption journey by clicking here. In fact, I provided a blog post update on this process a couple of weeks ago in case you missed it.
Well, after all the ups, downs, and in betweens of going through this rigorous yet emotional roller coaster ride yet again in 2011, today was “D-Day” for us as we found out whether all the shots, injections, strict instructions and everything else involved actually made a difference. Regardless of the outcome of the test, July 5, 2011 was going to be a turning point in the lives of Jimmy and Christine Moore. If it came back negative, then we would have to live knowing that perhaps we were never meant to have children. If it came back positive for being pregnant, then our lives would soon be turned upside down. As I’ve done throughout this experience (with Christine’s insistence and blessing, by the way), I chronicled it all on video for you to see what happened when the doctor’s office called to give us the news on Day 97 today:
Yep, we’re pregnant! YES!!! The overwhelming outpouring of love and support (and lots of tears!) on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube has been unbelievable and we are very grateful to all of our friends, family and people who have loved and prayed for us for years to have this happy moment. We know we’re not out of the woods yet but we’re expecting to have at least one (maybe multiples–be still my fluttering heart!) baby in the next nine months. I’m gonna be a daddy! WOW! That hasn’t quite sunk in yet. I know it will in due course. But right now I am just ecstatic with joy beyond belief and ready to take on the challenges of parenthood–at the ripe old age of 40 by the time the due date happens! I’m sure glad I’m livin’ la vida low-carb so I can keep up with the munchkin(s). THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU to all of YOU my readers who have supported me through the years as Christine and I have traveled this journey. We appreciate your thoughts and prayers and look forward to sharing in this genuine miracle that has happened for us. We’ll let you know how everything is going through our continuing YouTube videos and postings on the social networking sites. God bless you guys! WE LOVE YOU!
