"I had a dream!" - our miracle opportunity sent from above

Below is our soon to be success story, we hope! To protect the privacy of our anonymous donating couple, I have changed some little things about our story. Don't worry, you will still get the main wonderful gist. Although embryos are donated all the time around the world, it’s still a small world.  You never know who knows who, especially in Utah lol!


The dream:
Ok, so it’ll probably sound weird, but…“I had a dream!” I had the same dream several times in July/August. It was always the same, and soo very real. I was sitting in a hospital bed in a blue gown, holding a baby girl with lots of dark brown hair. I can’t see her face because it’s as if I’m watching it all from above. But, Blake and I are crying because we are so happy, and are cuddling our new baby. I say to Blake, “I can’t believe that we did a fertility treatment again, and it worked!” He lovingly looked at me, then rubbed her chubby little cheek with his hand. That was it...short and sweet. That's all that was said. I was still crying when I woke up, the dream was so real, wonderful, and very detailed. In the dream I can even see the facial features of the nurses that are taking some stuff out of my room (if this treatment works and I have these nurses, I'm really going to be freaked out, ha ha!). I can smell the room and feel the spirit strongly. The baby is sleeping, so warm and wrapped up in a little yellow, blue and pink striped blanket. We are in our own little heaven in this moment. I don’t know where I am in the dream, but I know for sure that I just gave birth to a baby. ME!

I told Blake the next day that I had the dream and that it was so real, but we thought that was really weird because it just ISN'T possible! We knew we weren’t doing IVF again because it just wouldn’t work, and we can’t afford it again anyways. And we knew we weren’t going to do a sperm donor. So after I had the dream a couple more times, I was starting to get really annoyed. One night when I couldn’t sleep, I got on the internet to look at fertility treatments because the dream was really bothering me. Still not sure why I randomly went to their specific website, divine intervention I assume, but I found a section on Embryo Donation/Adoption on a Utah fertility center's website, and about had a heart attack! We have joked over the years about wishing we could "buy embryos on the black market”, ha ha, so I was really shocked to see that it is an actual thing. We had no idea! (It has become more publicly know in the last several years, but has been around since the 90's! Not all fertility clinics offer it, but there are a couple of big donation centers in the country.) I didn’t want to get too excited because I figured it had to be really expensive or have a really long waiting list. And we were so sick of WAITING and being in constant limbo. Nothing is worse than never ending limbo! Didn't want to get our hopes up again, only for them to be crushed. But I emailed them anyways a few days later.

The phone call:
A couple days after that, a lady we are now working with, called me one unsuspecting Tuesday afternoon while I was watching Netflix. The conversation went very differently than we both had expected. She initially told me that the waiting list was really long so to maybe call their NV clinic because they had more embryos. For some reason I just wasn't feeling great about that location, although MORE embryos should have been really tempting! So, after we got talking some more about Blake and I, she got excited and said, “oh my gosh, I think I have something for you!" I was in shock, I don't even know if I replied to any of what she said actually, ha ha. But she literally had paperwork on her desk that day about a group of embryos that were just about ready to be put into the donation pool by a couple who had completed their family already via IVF. The donating couple had some specifics on who could receive their embryos (this happens sometimes), and it was seeming that they may not find someone soon for these embryos. There were 30 or so other couples on the waiting list who didn’t meet all or any of the donating couple’s criteria. So we are SUPER lucky to not be playing the waiting game, yet again, and lucky to have been the perfect match! So very grateful! To top it all off, this couple has several, YES - THAT'S SEVERAL, remaining frozen embryos! The norm donated is 1-4, tops. So we are realllly blessed! And, the basic info we got on the couple…hair colors, eye colors, body types, heights, race, religion, and even college degrees, are all almost the same as ours! Craziness!! Not that we wouldn’t have been happy if they were total opposites, but this just makes it so much more special for us! We are so very grateful to this donating couple, they will NEVER know how much this means to us. Giving the gift of life and family to those who couldn’t have it otherwise, is so selfless and wonderful! This allows us to adopt in a sense (a VERY early on adoption), and have the extra pluses of being able to carry the children and experience the miracles of pregnancy!

Other fun info:
Luckily everything has gone really smoothly. I already got all of my pretreatment exams out of the way here in our own state. A wonderful local psychologist really felt for us and gave us a smoking deal on our required psych evals, which can be over $1,000.00 easy. Another wonderful blessing along the way! We could have started sooner than next month, but the doctor and I wanted me to try to lose another 10 lbs. I'm actually down almost 35 lbs, YAY, and we're praying like crazy that this works!   

Since adoption laws only apply to babies after they’re born, there aren’t nearly as many hoops to jump through for this. This makes us really happy, and much less stressed! We don’t need a home study, there isn’t the traditional pile of adoption paperwork or the frustrating adoption processes, no fingerprinting or background checks, no worrying about birth parents possibly changing their minds, and all of that not so fun and time consuming stuff. This treatment is way less intense than IVF too, which is good news for me because I got hyper-stimulated with IVF :( I was totally and completely miserable, with ovaries the sizes of what felt like soccer balls. For this treatment, I only have to do shots to prep my uterus for about 3 weeks, so it won’t be bad at all. The needles are huge though, ha ha. And hopefully we can get a few children from this great opportunity, if the embryos thaw well, KNOCK ON WOOD! Never thought this was possible! After our failed IVF cycle, it made us kind of nervous to share anything this time around because we were so heartbroken and hated having people ask what had happened. But here it is, the whole scoop! :) Trying to keep the faith! The doctors say I check out great, so there shouldn’t be any reason to think it shouldn’t work out. Trying to stay positive, Mom! :) Our “beautiful frozen babies” or "snowflakes", as we call them, are all high quality as well. So we're hoping for great results with the help of our fertility doctor and our loving Heavenly Father.

Please cross your fingers, toes (and anything else that can possibly be crossed!), in the coming month as we start our FET (Frozen Embryo Transfer via Embryo Donation) in Utah! This truly amazing treatment option fell out of the sky into our laps out of nowhere, when we were least expecting it. We both had sadly ALMOST came to terms with the fact that we were probably never going to have any children. I was so close to calling it quits, so close. We had prayed about adoption again numerous times, and just wasn’t feeling great about it for some reason. And this is why! Heavenly Father hears our prayers, does things in HIS time and not ours, and knows what is best for us. My patriarchal blessing says inventions will be of great use to me in this life, we are hoping that it may be referring to these treatments! :) It is amazing that they have all of these wonderful technologies and procedures for people like us to grow their families. Though at times we may feel abandoned by the Lord, and as if we are getting the short end of the stick, we must trust in him and keep our faith!