So… here’s the deal…

In 2001 Liza and I found out she has a condition called Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome. This meant we would probably have some trouble having kids. That was fine. We weren’t married yet but were glad we were able to go into it with eyes wide open. We also knew that we wanted to adopt. So, we knew it would all work out somehow. We would be parents regardless.

Fast forward a bit… we’d been trying or not NOT trying for about four years. Things weren’t working out, much like we expected. So, we went to see a fertility specialist and to try IUI to see if that would work. This procedure and everything it takes to get ready for it can be pretty costly, especially if your insurance doesn’t cover it (and ours didn’t, which isn’t necessarily unusual). And… long story short… it didn’t work out.

That was in March. We took April off to re-coop and then took May off because I was so super busy getting ready for camp and Liza was trying to wrap school up. Then we started trying to decide what to do next.

Liza really wanted to try IUI again. She desperately wanted to be a biological mother. I wanted to go ahead with adoption. The biological part wasn’t that important to me and I couldn’t see spending that amount of money again with no guarantee (not to mention that we didn’t have that money to spend; we had already exhausted all of our financial resources). So, we were at a bit of an impasse… However, I eventually relented, and we planned to call Liza’s fertility doctor and move forward trying that route again. But, we held off for a little bit because I still had a bit of traveling to get done with a three week stretch where I was going to be in South Africa and then Liza would join me to go to Daytona Beach and then San Francisco.

While in San Fran, Liza was really, really sick, just nauseus, like, all the time. So, we knew something wasn’t right. However, whenever Liza call’s her doctor with these type of issues, one of the first questions they always ask is, “have you taken a pregnancy test?” So, she has to take one, and it’s always negative, and she get’s really upset. But we knew before we called that she needed to take one. She usually keeps one or two generic brand ones on hand. So, the day after we got back from San Fran, before she drove to Jackson to pick up our dog, she took one.

Now, we have to pause here to explain to those of you who don’t know about pregnancy tests how they work (this isn’t true for all of them, but is for the one’s we used). When you take one, there are two little circles. The one to the right has a vertical line in it if you used the test correctly. The one to the left will then either have a horizontal negative symbol. if you’re not pregnant, or a positive symbol if you are.

Following is what we were used to seeing:

Here’s what we wanted to see:

Here’s what we saw:

Well, actually I hadn’t seen it yet. I was at work. But Liza called me on her way to Jackson on the verge of freaking out. She explained it to me, and I tried to calm her down and just told her that she should take another one since the one she had taken had obviously messed up. I was thinking that somehow that left circle got turned around so that it was still a HTTP/1.1 200 OK Date: Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:30:34 GMT Server: Apache Expires: Thu, 19 Nov 1981 08:52:00 GMT Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cache X-Pingback: http://chriskinsley.com/xmlrpc.php Link: ; rel=shortlink Connection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1

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