After the Infertility – Adoption

To start, let me introduce myself. My name is Keelee Seguin.  I’m 33 years old, I live in the beautiful state of Utah, I am an active member of the LDS church, have done hair for almost 15 years, and am married to an extremely handsome but more importantly, the most stand up guy that I’ve ever met. I still shake my head in unbelief that I ever found him!  I can honestly say I’ve had an extremely wonderful and blessed life thus far. It’s been full of adventure, amazing experiences, people I adore, love, heart break and my fair share of ups and downs which I am grateful for today. I am who I am for those hard things I’ve gone through and can look at them and say ,”thank you… you made me solid and strong and I like who I am because of it.” This is my short version of my infertility story and I’m happy to share it. Just a heads up though (men), if you have issues with hearing words like, uterus, period or sperm…you should turn away now:)

Ever since I can remember I have wanted to be a mother. Doesn’t every little girl feel that way? My childhood consisted of me carrying around my baby dolls that I constantly fussed over, changing them, feeding them, swaddling them. Barbies too. I got up to 67 babies to be exact, I counted them all the time. With my barbies I would make believe that I was a mom and always making up scenarios of things that revolved around me being a mom.  I was the girl that would have 5 to 6 kids and though my house would be a wreck and we would have mustard in our hair, we would have a great time with puppet shows and playing dress up and making cookies. At least that was the vision I always had… partly due to the fact that my mom would laugh about these funny future scenarios and remind me what an amazing mom she thought I would be! That was always a huge boost to me little ego.

I was married at 19 years old, and crazy enough if it were up to my naive little self I would’ve started a family ASAP. We had a tough marriage from the start and so it wasn’t till about 4 1/2 years into it that we started trying. After determining that we both had some issues that were making it difficult to get pregnant we bumped up the gears and I started taking Chlomid along with other hormones.

So, the story on the street is the hormones make you crazy?! Ha… they make you flippin looney tunes people. Hot flashes, mood swings, extremely tired, ridiculously hungry and way angry for no reason. Like I remember one day walking down the street hoping some gangster would come try to steal my purse just so I could pummel the tar out of them. Haha… that’s an awesome visual huh?! We are talkin like the worst PMS known to mankind, on steroids.

With still no luck we moved on to Artificial insemination. AI is nowhere near as expensive or invasive as Invetro but I will say it’s just as emotionally draining and heart breaking with each fail. Basically it’s a sort of catheter where they insert the sperm into the uterus with bypassing all the debris. Yada Yada.. you get the idea. After three tries it was determined that I had endometriosis and needed a small surgery, which I ended up getting again several years later. Which explained a lot about the seriously painful periods each month. My spouse also had to have a small procedure that ended up not doing a whole lot. Three more artificial insemination’s went by with zero success. Never once a positive pregnancy. At this point I was beyond frustrated.

It’s funny to me the expectations we put on ourselves to measure what our happiness will be. Or what ideas we have when we are much younger of what our future lives will look like. And most importantly, when we grow and realize what we actually become okay with in our lives. At this point in my life though I could not see any positivity coming out of the situation and to top it off our marriage was in a really bad place.

About a year later we were divorced. I was 27 and couldn’t believe that not only was I divorced, but I was not able to ever have kids up to that point. Huh, not how I pictured my life going. I was young yes, but living in Utah and being 27 with no kids you feel a little behind. A few years later I met and married my perfect match.

Truly I often think about how I actually feel blessed that it’s a challenge for me to have kids. I think my Heavenly Father was looking out for me all this time. Had it been easy for me to have kids I indeed would’ve with my ex and it would have been a disaster. Not at all an ideal situation to bring children into. So as tough as all this is that I’m about to explain, know that I see the blessing in it. Doesn’t make it easy but it sure makes more sense in my head.

Anyways, I knew my situation with my endometriosis and now being 31 and the two of us not wanting to waste any time we decided to start trying immediately. Six or seven months went by with zero success, so we looked into getting help. Three Artificial inseminations and still zero success. Deep down I had kind of planned on worst case scenario, Invetro. I had heard of people that had done it and watched some youtube videos watching people show how they do the shots and medications and what not. I was scared out of my mind. Just in case you are wondering it’s around $12-$15 thousand dollars(including medications) per try.  It’s about a 6-8 process consisting of about 4 shots a day and several other oral medications. That first round I couldn’t even watch my sweet husband give me the shots. I’d say you have to have roughly 10-12 vaginal ultra sounds and countless blood tests.  Needless to say you lose all shame and are 100% at the doctors mercy. The point of all the medications is to basically stimulate your eggs so you drop a good 5-18 eggs in the hopes that once they get them all out, you have some to freeze for later on in life when you want more kids. Once they get the eggs out of you they put them in a little dish and fertilize them with your husbands sperm. Then they have to reach a certain point to become viable. It’s like a sci-fi movie if you ask me. Trippy.  I was hoping for 8… trying to not be too greedy:)

That first round rocked my world! 5 days before my projected “egg retrieval” I was in getting an ultra sound so they could count all the zillions of little eggs I was harvesting….. and nothing. The poor doctor had to tell me, “Oh sweety, you don’t really have any eggs to even do this. We will just try again in a couple months. Go get a shake and have good cry.” Pardon the hell right outta me?!?!? What???!! I’m not even joking you I was out. of. my. mind. for a solid 4 days. The worst part was that I had to go back to my world of doing women’s hair every day, and since I’m an open book… too much at times, I had to explain 17 billion times what happened, why, how, bla bla bla. That’s the good thing about a stallion of a dad and 3 brothers. Once you kick, scream and cry you learn to stand up, brush yourself off and try again. ha! So I did the torture again…..and again. Wow I must be a glutton for punishment!! The second time getting 2 viable eggs and the 3rd time one. Nothin. nada. nope. I tell ya what. The whole thing is a real kick in the uterus. I’m 33 and I’m a Dr Suess story, my rotting green eggs and ham are useless. ugh!

Let me just take a small break here and tell you some things that people say. The first rule being that, you honestly can’t ever say the right thing to a woman that’s on fertility meds and can’t get pregnant. So seriously, just listen. And if it just happens to be that they are in the mood to talk about it, they will. Here’s a list of things to for sure not say:

HA! K so if you’re reading this and think, “Crap I’ve done that”, it’s really okay. As for me I understand people that say these things are only trying to be nice and you can’t really understand how it feels unless you’ve actually been through it…just like any hard thing in life right?! Truly it’s really taught me to not be so judgmental of people. In fact, before this experience I’m willing to bet I’ve said some of those very same things to people that confided in me that were trying to get pregnant.

Here’s where my hubby and I are at with the whole fertility thing having dealt with it for over 2 years(9 in total for myself) and over $50,000 later. It’s hard and draining. We want more than anything in this world to be parents. We both lovvvvve kids. Shoot I love my 2 dogs embarrassingly and they aren’t even human. We are 100% positive we want to adopt. We kind of always talked about it and wanted to anyways… just thought maybe it would be the caboose or something. My husband and I have thought and prayed about it a lot and feel so sure this is the next step. I have so much respect for mothers who are willing to give their babies up. When I really think about it, the thought of some amazing person handing me over her baby and trusting me with it, makes me cry.

I have to the opportunity to talk to many people about adoption. The pros and cons. I’m extremely grateful for my friend Jason Dunnigan that has talked to me a little bit about his experience with adoption. We really are so excited about this and it feels so good to have finally made the decision and to be moving forward with it.

My advice to women who suffer from infertility, and I need to take my own advice better at times, don’t let it consume you! Find hobbies and other things that distract you and bring you joy. Don’t let it make you feel like any less of a person. Sadly I have wound up feeling this way a time or two. Try your best to not become bitter or angry, especially at those around you having babies. Look for the positive and keep your hope… and stay open minded!!

Life is beautiful and the things that make it so wonderful are the mountains we have to climb to get to the top and see that beautiful view. I feel lucky that I was born with a positive attitude and good perspective. Trust me, it’s not always rainbows and skittles, especially with infertility, but somehow you learn to cope. Fortunately my beliefs are what get me through. There are some things in life we have no control over so we do the very best we can… and usually it turns out better than we ever expected. That’s what I’ve learned anyways. Infertility does not mean we don’t get to be moms. What it does mean though is that we will reallllly appreciate motherhood when it actually happens. I hope if nothing else I can use my experience and positive outlook to help others. It’s been the help and support from others that has gotten me through this whole experience.