Daily Dose of Sultnpapper 02/07/18 > 20 Years Ago Today; Our Trip to the Public Library

It’s not very often that a person makes a trip to the public library and it would make such a significant impact on them that they would remember it twenty years later, especially when that trip never even involved going inside the building. But that is exactly the case for the Mr.& Mrs. Sultnpapper, and as you might guess, it was the Tomball Public Library.

Let me take you back to that time in 1998 and actually a little farther than that day.

When my wife and I married in 1994 we had our plans set on raising a family, we had set the number of little pappers that we would like to raise at five, enough for our own basketball team. We didn’t waste any time on getting started down that road either but Mother Nature wasn’t playing along with our plan. So after a year of trying to get pregnant the doctor said we might need to run some tests and see what the problem might be, I checked out fine, my wife on the hand had some issues. According to the doctor it wasn’t anything major and a simple forty five minute outpatient surgery would fix the problem and we would be on the road to raising a family.

So we elected for the surgery, and what was supposed to be forty minutes turned into seven hours and four different surgeons. That was the longest seven hours of my life, and as each hour went by and each surgeon came and informed me of what he had done in the operating room I became increasingly worried. I won’t go into all the details but as can imagine she wasn’t coming home that night, in fact it would be six days later before she was discharged.

The primary surgeon, Dr. Baker, who had told us the forty five minutes for the surgery, also told us afterword that our chances of having children had gone “excellent” to it would take a “miracle”. He said that he had never, in is twenty five years of doing endometriosis surgeries, seen a case so severe. The other three surgeons who were all specialist with other organs like liver, colon, pancreas and kidneys all agreed. They also had to work on all those organs just mentioned during my wife’s surgery.

So needless to say we were devastated with the prognosis for children, it didn’t stop us from trying though. We ended with fertility specialists; we did everything known to the medical world in the next two years with no results. Each month became more frustration; all the treatments and procedures had taken a huge toll both emotionally and financially. The end result was no pregnancy and on Mother’s Day in 1997 we decided to throw in the towel and go the adoption route.

Things started looking up right away, and on February 6, 1998 our son that we were going to adopt was born in Tomball, Tx. at the local hospital. It was a private adoption that had numerous twists and turns but in the end it all worked out. We were there for the delivery and it was a big day for the wife and I, nice healthy baby boy and no problems or issues for the baby or the mother. The hospital said that both could be discharged the next day, since he was born early in the morning on the sixth.

So on the seventh we showed up at the hospital to bring our new son home, and then the hospital informed us that we could not leave the property with the baby. Despite the fact that the birth mother is telling the hospital that everything was good, and all the paper work was in order, the hospital refused to allow us to take custody of the baby. It got to the point that the local police were about to get involved, I finally gave up rather than go to jail.

On the way out of the hospital, I phoned the hospital from my cell phone and had them connect me to the birth mothers room. We were able to set up a meeting for immediately after she and the baby would be discharged from the hospital. The Tomball library is about two blocks from the hospital so we set up to meet in the parking lot of the library. It was about an hour later when the mother and baby arrived, and we took possession of our new son.

I like to tell people that we got our oldest boy from the library; we checked him out from there and never took him back. Now that he is twenty years old I couldn’t afford to take him back if I wanted too, the late fees would be too damn much.

We never dreamed that we would ever adopt a child, but I can tell you from experience, it is a roller coaster ride that is worth the price of the ticket. It is not a cheap ticket either when you go the private adoption route, but he has grown to be a fine young man and we love him to death. So I wanted to share this story on the twentieth anniversary of him coming into our lives.

I might also mention that we were set to adopt a set of twins from Russia in 2002, but those plans changed when we found out the wife was pregnant with our first natural born son. So, without any of the fertility shots, artificial insemination or the in vitro fertilization things we had tried before, we ended up with our miracle baby in 2002. Those doctors don’t know as much as they pretend to know, we also have two daughters that came along after him, or maybe they do, and we just happen to have been blessed with four miracles.

Until next time,
@sultnpapper

https://sola.ai/sultnpapper