Photos and Post By: Emily Horstman
After the disappointing news that we didn’t have any embryos from our second IVF cycle, we had to decide on what to do next. I didn’t think that I could emotionally jump back in and do a 3rd cycle, plus IVF is expensive. We would have to wait and save if that is what we were to decide. Doubt started to creep in and I began to wonder if IVF would ever work for us, I mean IVF isn’t a guaranteed thing. Ross and I started thinking about other options. After all, all we really wanted was a baby. Maybe it was time to look into adoption. One day while scrolling through Instagram I typed the word adoption into the search bar. I thought maybe I could find some people on there and learn about their experiences. What I found was not what I excepted, let alone knew it was an option. A girl names Kelsi Wallace came up. Under her name read the words Embryo Adoption. I thought, huh? I have heard of egg donors/sperm donors but not this. I fell into a rabbit hole looking through all of her IG posts, learning about this new thing that I had just discovered. I was amazed by her story. **Y'all should really go check her out (no haters please, she will put you in her basement – inside joke of hers). Her IG is under thewallacechronicles_ivf.
We had our follow-up appointment with our doctor on September 9th, 2020 to discuss our next step. Our doctor went over our last IVF cycle and the outcome and in the nicest way, possibly told us that she felt like they had tried everything that they could do. She explained that with how low my egg quality was and when you add in Ross’ sperm not being the strongest, the odds didn’t seem in our favor. She would totally support us if we decided to do another IVF cycle but she said that the chance that we would get one good embryo out of an IVF cycle was extremely low, we could do 20 IVF cycles and maybe we would get one. We talked about egg donation a little bit and then I got the nerve to ask about the embryo adoption that I had read about. My doctor just smiled at me and said we do, but in Alabama, it’s not really adoption it’s a donation. She wanted us to go home and really talk about our options and then we could call and let the clinic know our decision.
We meet back at ART on October 19th with our decision. We had decided on embryo donation. She talked with us about how they handle the embryo donations there and told us that we would first have to go through a counseling session before we could really get things started. It was standard practice. She gave us a card with who they suggest their patients go to.
November 6, 2020, we met with Josh at Warrior Wellness in Birmingham, Al. He is a super nice guy and turned out to be the husband of Caitlin, one of my favorite nurses at ART. I definitely recommend Josh at Warrior Wellness if you are ever looking for a good counselor and are in the Birmingham area. Josh explained that he would have to type up our report and send it over to the ART for Dr. Mann to look over. We should hear from ART in about 3 weeks or so.