Terry & Liz Taylor Adoption Fund

Looking for a life change Terry moved to Lawrence, Ks in 2003, shortly thereafter he met Liz and it was love at first sight! 6 years later we were married and 11 years later we were finally ready to start our family. Our choices in life have always been very thought out. That is why we waited so long to get married and even longer to start a family. We knew to have an emotionally and financially stable family we needed to make sure that Liz finished nursing school and that Terry was well on his way to finishing respiratory therapy school. Unfortunately waiting this long did not work in our favor biologically.

We started trying to get pregnant in Sept 2014 and in Nov Liz went in for a checkup. What was supposed to be a routine gyno visit which included some blood work showed that Liz had some imbalanced hormone levels and should see a specialist. Little did we know this routine appointment would be the start of something that would end up turning our world upside down. We went to KU Med center with the assumption that all that was needed was some medication to balance out her hormone levels. It was obvious during the conversations with the specialist that we were all on different pages as to what was going on. The specialist was brutally honest in letting us know the reality of our situation. This is when we found out that we were not able to conceive children naturally due to Liz finding out that she has pre-mature ovarian failure. For us this was devastating. We had been concentrating so hard on getting Liz through nursing school and then Terry through respiratory therapy school that the thought of us not being able to conceive had never crossed our minds. When you constantly hear ‘You’re young, you have plenty of time’, you begin to believe it. The next few weeks we both felt like we were walking through a fog. Once the reality of the situation set in, we knew we had to start looking at all our possibilities. We met with a reproductive endocrinologist to explore our options. She said our best, and really only option, to have a child naturally would be IVF (in vitro fertilization). IVF consists of taking a frozen egg (from an egg bank) and fertilizing it with Terry’s sperm. After 5 days of growing the fertilized egg outside the body, it is then implanted in Liz.

With the help and donations of many people we were able to attempt three rounds of IVF (which cost us $40,000 total), unfortunately we were not able to carry any of those pregnancies to term. 

With our IVF trials behind us we are now moving on to adoption. With adoption also comes another round of expenses that can total anywhere up to $35,000. We started the process in early 2016, and we will be having our home study done in mid Dec.

We want to thank everyone for taking the time to read our story.