Living within the constraints

Element of acceptance #1:  The willingness to live within the boundaries of life’s natural constraints

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I understand this post is longer than our usual posts.  Bear with, please.

One Thursday night last August was the worst night (so far) of me and Brittany’s life together.  We went to the doctor for an ultrasound on her pregnancy and found out that the pregnancy was not viable.  We also found out that Brittany has an extremely rare (less than 1% of women) condition: a unicornuate uterus, which basically means she has half of a uterus (at best).  After consulting with the doctors it became clear that, in her particular case, a best-case scenario is an extremely early (25 weeks or so) birth with incredibly high risks all the way around.  That is a true best-case scenario. In other words, statistically, we’d more than likely be looking at many, many losses and even if we could get to 25 weeks one of those times, that is still very touch-and-go for a baby (though it is technically possible for a baby to survive at that time) and for Brittany.  This is why, when people say to us, “Well you’ll probably get pregnant now that you’re adopting,” we respond with, “We hope not- as the risks are very high.” The risks are even higher now that we have a child of our own.  We do not feel we can risk losing Norah’s mom just to play roulette with biological children.

When we got this news, life presented us with a new set of constraints we did not previously know that we had.  IVF would not be particularly useful to us as we did not have problems getting pregnant (we had problems staying pregnant).  We could either: continue to risk Brittany’s body and health on the hope that we would stumble into a best-case scenario, at which point Brittany’s health would still be compromised and we would instantly be tasked with caring for an infant who may or may not live (again, that’s best-case).  Or, we could adopt.  Or, we could figure out what it would mean to live as two people who desperately want to be parents who will not have the opportunity.  Primarily we discussed the second and third options as Brittany already felt like she had been in physical agony for a full year.

You see, despite how much pain we were in, we knew we had to live within life’s constraints.

More on this tomorrow.