Chupchik

I’m always interested in reading about other people’s adoption stories, so here’s how we came to the decision to adopt:When B and I met in early 2000 I had been having a rather rampant case of the baby wants for as long as I could remember … B wasn’t quite so sure then, he was especially skeptical about having birth children. But it soon became clear that we wanted to be together and that we wanted to have a family. So I did what most young women do and assume that stopping bc pills is all that’s needed - we had briefly discussed adoption as an alternative but were too spooked by the length of the process, the need for us to have been married for a certain time (at this point in time we weren’t married yet) and the idea that I might have to work with the same local social workers who had dealt with my niece’s placement in the 1980s … So we went down the “easy” route and put our fluffy adoption ideas on the backburner for “a subsequent child”.
What followed was a saga about suspicious hormonal problems, a long fight with the German medical system to be diagnosed, to have PCOS accepted as a diagnosis, to get on the correct treatment. It kept us busy with doctors’ appointments across half of Germany for the most part of 2001-2003. We weren’t doing any IF treatments during this time as I insisted on getting basic health care for PCOS first before becoming pregnant. We had also agreed early on that we weren’t interested in aggressive treatments as we had a slight preference for adoption anyway, certainly over IVF.
Some time in 2003 I met a gynecologist with an interest in metabolical disorders who seemed more aware of evidence-based medicine, so we became more involved in treatments. A first attempt at ovulation induction which failed miserably and a test of tube patency which surprisingly showed both tubes as blocked threw an enormous wrench in our slow progress - we were faced with a decision point, IVF after all? Stopping here and applying to adopt? Gut-wrenching discussions followed, lots of tears, pain, grief. And the decision to stop all treatments and put our efforts into adoption instead. As we were planning to move to the UK at that time, an intense time of reading about the UK adoption options/system followed as well as a long phone consult with an Adoption UK counsellor about our options. To my big surprise, I felt fantastic with our decision! I felt more at peace than I’d felt for years! I couldn’t wait to get started but I knew we still had a move from Germany to the UK ahead of us first, so this was going to take a while.
A month later a repeat tube test showed both tubes had opened since the previous test, and without much thought we saw ourselves thrown back into the ovulation induction circus which failed as miserably as the first time round. Two months later I was at the end of my rope, and B and I had a short but intense late-night talk about the future in which I told him that I wanted to stop treatments for good and concentrate on adoption. I wanted to get back to that wonderful feeling of concentrating on something worthwhile, I wanted that feeling of being my old self that I’d had during the month between the two tests. B was thrilled :-)
I gave myself 3 months to see how I’d feel with the decision, I didn’t tell anyone we’d stopped TTC. I just couldn’t believe that I would feel so good having stopped something that had consumed me for the last 3 years! A few weeks into the “trial stop”, and I couldn’t imagine looking back, I felt so, so good with our decision. We stopped TTC in February 2004. A month later we found out that B was going to lose his job, and we had the rug properly pulled from under our feet. As for what happened between then and now, that’s another saga. Suffice to say it took us this long to get back on our feet but now that we’re at least half-settled in NL we couldn’t wait another minute to get going with a decision we took over 3 years ago …