Zane's story part 3

I went to church with a heavy heart Sunday. Whenever I saw another friend who had adopted or was on an adoption journey I started to cry. I was going to have to say "no" to this baby that emotionally I really wanted, but who just didn't seem like a good fit in our family. Dave and I had said at the very beginning, that we were going to adopt, but we were not going to sacrifice our 4 children to do so. Sure we all have to sacrifice something, but we didn't want to bring medically fragile children home who might take up 90% of our time and energies.
Monday brought emails chronicling Yared's time at the orphanage. It seemed that they had him for a few days, then he was vomiting and they took him to the hospital. They said his hemoglobin was 5 and that it was too low for surgery so he needed the transfusion.
That evening Dave and I had a long discussion. We talked about our reasons for adopting. We talked about Seth and how our decision about Yared would affect him. The longer we take, the longer he waits in the orphanage. We discussed how to determine how to make the "right" decision. If we made the "wrong" decision we would be taking someone else's baby. Maybe we would take him from someone who was more equipped to care for him. What if he was supposed to come to us and we said "no". Then what?
Eventually we decided that a bowel obstruction was too much of a chronic medical issue to add to our family. We don't have family members living near us, we have no one to take care of our kids should we have to stay in the hospital with a child for an extended period. We tried to put the idea of Yared behind us and look forward to another referral. From the emails and some of the information at the beginning there seemed a small chance that Yared's problem had been a pyloric stenosis. This is an innocuous problem which truly is a one time surgical fix. Trying not to be hasty we decided that we would wait to find out what the obstruction was. If it was anything other than a pyloric stenosis we would say "no". If it was pyloric stenosis then we would continue on and see if we could figure out the blood transfusion stuff.