Our Journey to Start A Family

The past year has been the most significant of our lives and marriage.

We have moved nearly 1,000 miles away from everything familiar. We have started new full-time jobs that have challenged and encouraged us. We have become financially independent for the first time in our young marriage. We have become a part of a great new church family. We have built relationships with friends that we know will last a lifetime. The list continues.

These major changes have brought with them moments of sheer joy, excitement, and contentment in the life God has given us. For these blessings, we should be thankful!

But unfortunately, thankfulness has been hard to come by. Despite the high “highs” of this season, the lows have been very low and left us struggling to find hope.

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On Christmas Eve, 2013, we were blessed to find out we were expecting a baby! God found it fit to bless us with a child and we couldn’t be more thankful.

The news was the greatest Christmas gift either of us will ever receive. We were to be parents. It was the news I always dreamed of hearing. I was ready to be a mommy, and I was thrilled! We would be celebrating our next Christmas with our very own bundle of joy.

Our joy overflowed into excited conversations with close friends and family. We shared laughs, hugs, tears, and spoke freely of the nine-month journey we were setting upon.

For seven days we relished our new identity as parents. We dreamed of the little baby we would soon be welcoming into the world. We thought of names, philosophies for parenting, and prayed our child would learn to follow Jesus. Our lives would forever be changed. For seven days, we were not simply Jen and Gray—we were Mommy and Daddy.

For seven days.

On New Years Day, I began experiencing signs of miscarriage. I have never experienced such gut-wrenching despair. I knew I was losing our baby, but there was nothing that I could do but pray and plead with the Lord to spare the precious life that he had given us and that we wanted so much. Frantic calls to nurses and eventual doctors visits confirmed my anguished fears: we had lost the baby.

Never has sorrow defeated joy as it did that day. The pain of loss is never so great as when the joy taken exceeds all earthly experiences.  My life was forever changed; our lives were forever changed.

Our grief has hardly relented since that day. Soon after receiving the news, in February, we moved to a new state after Gray accepted a position working for a church in Midlothian, Texas, thirty-minutes south of Dallas. With excitement tempered by heavy hearts, we transitioned from the loving support of our families and church family into a new and unfamiliar place.

We began settling in to our new home, slowly taking care of all the details required in moving. It was soon after that, in a routine visit to the doctor, I learned I had abnormal blood-work. At this point we were already anxious to begin trying to conceive again. Given the results of the blood-work, I was referred to a specialist: a brilliant reproductive endocrinologist in Dallas who does not take insurance, but who specializes in pregnancy loss and immunological disorders.

After six months, a considerable amount of doctors visits, and too many thousands of dollars to count, we’ve learned that I have quite a few immunological abnormalities: antinuclear antibodies, an autoimmune thyroid disease, and high numbers of natural killer cells. Most significant of these diagnoses is the number of active natural killer cells I have in my body.  Natural killer cells attack and kill anything foreign to my body, including viruses, cancer cells, and sadly babies. Together these diagnoses are deadly for babies in the womb. So deadly, that without medical treatment, I would have only a 4% chance of carrying a baby to term if I were to get pregnant again.

I was devastated. Our dreams of becoming parents quickly diminished with the heartbreaking news. My first emotion was sadness along with the constant question of Why? I went from dreaming about having a large family with multiple kids to pleading with God to just give me one. I have never felt so desperate and needy for the Lord in my life. I need his grace and peace to sustain me during this trial because my faith has never been put to test like it has been in this last year. The very thing I want in this life besides honoring the Lord is to be a mom and that road isn’t going to be as easy as I once thought. It has been a difficult pill to swallow.

Our hopes were soon lifted when we learned that with the right combination of medicines and treatments, my odds of carrying a baby full-term improved from only 4% to a staggering 78%, only two-percentage points below the average for healthy women! I could exhale. The nightmarish experience would soon be behind us! Or so I thought.

We were devastated once again in learning the cost of the prescribed treatment—none of which is covered by insurance. Among other medications, I will need Intravenous Immunoglobulin infusions (IVIG) for the first five months of pregnancy. These monthly infusions will suppress my immune system and eradicate the high number of natural killer cells in my body. IVIG is the most important of all the medicines; it is also the most expensive. Each infusion costs $2,500 cash at the time of the appointment. No payment plans. No insurance. No “I owe yous.” Without counting other medicines, treatments, or doctors visits, I will have to spend $12,500 simply to do what every woman should naturally be able to do: sustain a pregnancy.

The hard news of high costs was soon made even harder when we learned that additional fertility treatments will also be necessary in order for me to even get pregnant again. Because of all of the medications and treatments I will need in order to become a mom, my next pregnancy will cost close to $40,000. Needless to say, we are in well over our heads.

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Right now we want nothing more than to start our family. We have a diagnosis and a treatment plan that gives us an incredibly optimistic outlook for conceiving and sustaining a future pregnancy. But what we don’t have is money to cover the extravagant costs; what I don’t have is a storehouse of hope.

The shadow of New Years 2014 looms ever large, and the sorrow I feel intensifies with every passing day, every passing pregnancy announcement, every passing baby shower invitation. I want to be a mom more than anything in this world! The thought of not having that opportunity is nearly unbearable.

In my heart, I know that God exists. I know that he cares for me. But trusting in his goodness and in his faithfulness has been immensely difficult. Never in my life have I doubted him like I have the past eleven months. Never in my life have I had to struggle so consistently for joy. Never in my life has my heart hardened with bitterness, as it is prone to do these days. In many ways, this should have been the greatest year of my life. But I’ve been left reeling, stretched to limits I never thought possible, having conversations with doctors and with Gray that I was never prepared for.

Thankfulness has been hard to come by. Yet I know that I must choose faith, I must choose hope, and I must choose love. Although outwardly I am wasting away, inwardly I am striving to be renewed day by day. But it’s hard. I know that this is nothing in comparison to the weight of eternal glory. But I earnestly pray that this season will soon pass.

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We are already saving for Baby Gardner! But our paychecks alone will not be enough to support the costs mentioned above. So in order to help pay for the nearly $40,000 of medications and treatments we require, I will be making and selling personalized hand-stamped jewelry! You can see some of my work and get ordering information on my fashioned by hand Facebook page and/or Etsy shop. The cost is $30-40, and all proceeds will be going directly to our baby fund! We got the name fashioned by hand from Psalm 139 because it talks about how God created us and intimately knows us. It also says that everyday was planned or "fashioned"  before even one came to be. This chapter in psalm has been a great comfort to me during this trial. I am trusting that God gives life and he is intimately involved in every detail of each day. This trial has not taken him by surprise and he is in control. Every purchase made from fashioned by hand will get us a little closer to starting our family. You can place an order through my Etsy shop, Facebook page, or even sending me an email at jennifermgardner@me.com. 

Most of all, please pray for us as we walk this journey and trust the Lord through it all.