Ok, so the doctor just told you that it’s going to be somewhere around $2,500 per shot – two shots a month, for your entire pregnancy (that’s almost 9 months) in order to suppress your immune system so you can carry a baby you spent $10,000 to conceive in a test tube. Ouch.

Your story may not have started out like mine (see above), but everyone’s adoption journey begins somewhere, with a moment of ‘Oh, crap!’ – just like mine did. If you do the math, you’ll see that somewhere around $40,000 would have been spent on just the shots necessary to suppress my immune system. I already spent $20,000 before finding out about the shot in just finding out that I needed the shot (yeah, ouch again). And now, I had the choice of conceiving my baby in a test tube and spending un-godly sums of money trying to keep him/her around in my belly long enough to see him/her survive. Double ouch.

That assumed I would have a normal pregnancy and not face any of the other b-gillion problems real life throws our way.

My price tag skyrocketed.

For my husband and I, we couldn’t afford it. Not just the money (we could have made that work, if we really wanted), but also the emotional costs. We’d spent three years getting to the immune system answer. Only 2% of the population has this crazy thing, so we had no idea that all our hard work was going nowhere. At this point, I’d moved past the desire to actually conceive – I just wanted to be a mom.

My husband wasn’t convinced until we had this final conversation with the doctor – the $50,000 (equal to the larger portion of one year of my salary) was the last straw for him. We had one conversation in the car on the way home from the doctor’s office to seal the deal. Here’s my recollection:

Husband: ‘Wow - $50,000. That’s a lot.’

Me: ‘Yeah. I don’t know if that’s worth it.’

Husband: ‘Yeah. Me neither. I mean, that’s just crappy – what if the pregnancy doesn’t work out? We don’t get a refund, right?’

Me: Laughing. ‘No, there’s no refunds – doctors and insurance companies suck at that.’

Husband: Laughing. ‘Ok, cool. So, how do we adopt?’

So, there was the question, laying-out in the middle of the car between us, writhing in pain. Neither of us even knew anyone who’d adopted in the past. We were clueless. Where to start? Where to start?