To tell or not to tell?

To Tell or Not to Tell?

Deciding who, when and how much to tell people about fertility problems can be a big dilemma,   I think I’m fairly unusual in my approach to this issue. I talk quite openly about the fact that I’ve been trying for a baby for a number of years and that I’m waiting to have IVF but I know that others either don’t want or don’t feel able to share what they’re going through.

I don’t think there’s a right or wrong on this issue, a lot of people are very private and don’t want others to know their business.  I do think however that sometimes the secrecy that surrounds fertility issues can make the heartache all the more difficult to bear.  I work with about 100 people, a majority of them are women and there are usually 2 or 3 who are pregnant at any one time.  Watching other people go through their pregnancies has been one of the hardest things for me over the last 3 years, often harder than seeing people once they’ve had their babies.  I don’t think I could have got through those years if people hadn’t known.  People’s natural line of conversation when you’re married or in a long term relationship is often “When are you going to have children?” or even more difficult to stomach for those struggling with infertility “It’ll be you next.”  Leaving everything bottled up inside I think I would have tortured myself unnecessarily, at least if people know they tend to avoid these conversations.

In terms of who I’ve told and when, my approach has been kind of reversed; Ordinarily you would think that you’d tell close family and friends first and it would be work colleagues who you would be more likely to keep it from.  For me it was the other way round, my work colleagues have known pretty much all along, there’s probably a few factors that influenced this.   Nurses as a profession do tend to discuss things that other people don’t and since I see my infertility problems a medical struggle I guess it seemed a natural place to discuss it.  Another factor was that I was always felt more need to discuss things than Matt did, he wasn’t particularly embarrassed about it but just felt that it would happen before too long so what was the point in telling people.  So for me work was the only place where I am that Matt isn’t and a group of people that he doesn’t really socialise with so it gave me the opportunity to discuss how I was feeling without it affecting who and when Matt wanted to tell. As time has gone on Matt has been more willing to be open about things so this hasn't been such an issue but to start off with it really helped me. A third factor is that those closest to me have more invested in my struggle to become a mother (ouch, that word always hurts); My parents and Matt’s parents have their chances of having a first grandchile invested in it, my sister has her chances of becoming  a auntie invested in it, so there’s a lot more gravity in telling them than in telling people who it doesn’t really effect one way or another if I get pregnant.

I think the decision on who or what to tell has to be a joint one, it’s important to take time to understand each other’s coping mechanisms and to respect each other’s feelings.  If Matt really hadn’t wanted me to tell anybody I would have respected his views but on the other hand since I really wanted to be open about it he also took the time to respect my views and gradually over the years we’ve worked through who, when and how, we wanted to tell people.  It’s about finding a way of coping that suits both of you.  Certainly before I started keeping this blog I made sure Matt was ok with that, I was a little surprised to be honest, I thought he might find it a bit of an odd thing to do but I think he’s found it useful to watch video blogs on YouTube of other people’s IVF experiences so he’s happy for me to do the same for other people. 

The one thing I didn’t intend to be open about was exactly when we were having the IVF just because there’s then that period of time afterwards when people will be looking at me thinking “I wonder if she’s pregnant,” or asking me if it's worked.  When people started asking me about when I was starting IVF however I just found myself being honest and since I then decided to keep this blog everybody may well find out anyway!  So I’ll just have to hope people figure out not to ask if it worked or not and just to wait and see!

So for me I’ve made a conscious decision to be open about our IVF journey and in the process hope to help and inform others about the process and what people go through, but it's a very personal thing and everybody copes in different ways.

I’m very thankful that IVF is even available and I’m lucky enough to live in a country and a region where it’s available on the NHS.  If it works I plan to get this little baby grow for my baby, because I’m thankful for what science can do for me.

Enforced Patience

Lord grant me patience, but please hurry!

I am not a patient person by nature.  I was in a rush to get into the world and was nearly born in the car on the way to the hospital, my Mum always says I’ve been in a rush ever since. If I’ve made up my mind about something then I want it to happen straight away.

The thing about infertility is that you don’t have a choice but to be patient.  You’ve made plans, you’re ready to move on with your life and you’re excited about all the challenges and new experiences that being a parent will bring.  Yet you’re stuck in a constant cycle of getting yourself prepared for the biggest change of your life but equally being unable to  plan anything. It’s all on hold, do I book that big holiday next year, do we spend that money on the house, do I change jobs, it’s all up in the air!

If you know somebody is trying for a baby it’s best not to say to them “Just try to be patient,” because what they’re probably thinking  is “I DON’T HAVE A CHOICE!” (possibly with a few expletives added in for good measure). Life becomes a simple serious of waiting games, waiting for the right time of the month to try for a baby, the 2 week wait to find out if it’s actually worked this time, usually a series of thoughts much like this…. “Do my boobs hurt?” “Maybe I feel a bit sick?” “I am very tired today?” “I definitely feel a little bit sick but maybe it was just some dodgy chicken?” Then disappointment, then waiting that whole process starts over again but as time goes on a whole other layer of waiting is added in, waiting to be eligible for fertility investigations, waiting for appointments, waiting for tablets, waiting for referrals, waiting for letters, waiting for IVF….

 That is where I am now, waiting for IVF, our referral has finally gone off this week. I was told it had gone of 6 weeks ago but after a increasingly frustrating series of phone calls it’s finally gone off this Wednesday.  How long you have to wait to be eligible for IVF depends on where you live, in my area of Norfolk it’s 3 years in cases of unexplained infertility, although you’re eligible sooner in certain instances where there’s a clear reason you’re not getting pregnant.   In some places you’re eligible for IVF sooner regardless of whether they can find a cause, in others  they’ve cut funding altogether which is so unbelievably cruel and I really feel for those people now contemplating a £5000 bill or facing that they may never fall pregnant.    So now it’s just a matter of waiting for the letter from the infertility clinic, waiting for that first appointment, waiting for the treatment to start, waiting through all the weeks of injections….

So I am being patient but because I have to be, it’s never likely to be one of my greatest virtues.

1095 Folic Acid Tablets Later

Proverbs 30 v 16 (NLT)   

“There are three things that are never satisfied – no, four that never say, “Enough!”: the grave, the barren womb, the thirsty desert, the blazing fire.”

1095 Folic Acid Tablets Later

This is the first post for my infertility story. Of course it's 'our' infertility story really but I say 'my' rather than 'our' because these posts are my thoughts and feelings, I wouldn't want  to presume to speak for Matt. We're close and we'll go through each step of this toegether but our thoughts and emotional responses arn't always going to be the same.  It may seem strange to want to share this story, especially to share it in real time when emotions are new and raw rathar than as a reflection looking back after the event It’s something deeply personal, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this and decided it’s a process I want to go through. Whether the IVF works of not, this year's is going to be significant for me and Matt. I have lots of things I need to work through and I feel like writing about them will help. I could just write for myself but I think there’s something in me that wants people to understand; Infertility can be a very lonely journey, even though you’re going through it as a couple the rest of the world often doesn’t know or understand. A lot of people struggle with it alone and that can mean they suffer all the more. For me, sharing what I’m going through helps and maybe it will help other people to know they’re not alone.

36 months, 36 raised hopes dashed, expectations ended only in tears. 20 babies of friends seen into the world with joy, and 3 more on the way. 23 heart felt congratulations, but despite their sincerity each one still stabs me right in the heart. I never thought it would get this far, I wondered if I’d struggle to get pregnant knowing that my Mum had had problems but I never thought that 3 years down the line I’d still be waiting to become a mum. Who would ever have thought that the word mummy could be such a hurtful thing, it actually makes my heart ache, physically ache, to say it out loud.

I had just turned 27 when we decided we wanted a baby and now I’ve just turned 30, a big chasm of time eaten up in broken hopes and dreams. I can’t say it’s been 3 horrible, sad years and I’m quite proud of how we’ve not let our struggle to become parents overwhelm us because I can see how it could very easily send a person quite insane. Yet still, it’s always there, a stabbing that waxes and wanes but never disappears, waiting to jump out at me when I least expect it. Now we’re looking to the prospect of our NHS funded IVF starting soon and we’ve decided we’ll take the cycles offered for free and not pay for any more. I’m a mishmash of emotions at the moment; Part hopeful, part finding it impossible to believe there’s any chance it might work. I’m stuck – in limbo with my life, ready to move onto the next stage and become a mum but unable to, in limbo with my heart because I can neither hope nor despair because I really have no idea what might happen and both hope and despair are equally dangerous, hot coals that I’m juggling and if I get it wrong and pause too long on one or the other I’m likely to get burnt.

Our story so far….

We started trying for a baby just over 3 years ago. At the time we’d been together for 8 years, married for 4. It had taken us a while to get to that point. Before we married Matt hadn’t wanted children and I did. As far as I really knew this stayed the same for the first 4 years of our marriage. People used to ask how could I marry Matt when he didn’t want children. If you ask me now I would say I knew he’d change his mind, I feel like I knew Matt better than he knew himself (hope he doesn’t mind me saying that!) and I could see what a wonderful father he’d be before he could see what he wanted for himself. It did play on my heart though, a few years into our marriage I did sometimes ponder what might happen if he never changed his mind and as the years went on and I got to the point where I was ready to have children an impending sense of panic began to creep in. I knew I could have told him that I wouldn’t marry him unless he agreed to have children and I’m sure he would still have married me, but I never wanted it to be on those terms. I didn’t want to have the slightest doubt when we had children that it was something that he wanted as much as I did, I wouldn’t have felt that blackmail was a good basis for a strong marriage and certainly not for having children!

On 1st January 2012, my 27th birthday, I made a joke to Matt about how we should have a baby, something that I used to slip into doing despite my best efforts not to, and he said “Ok then.” It really was as simple as that and I couldn’t have been more shocked. It wasn’t a snap decision for him, it was something he’d been thinking about for a long time but hadn’t wanted to tell me until he was sure, but to me it felt so sudden because I hadn’t expected him to just come out with it like that! It took a while to sink in and he was at work the whole next day with me sat at home wondering if perhaps I’d dreamed the whole thing. Everything had fallen into place and I felt so happy that now I knew that Matt had truly changed his mind and his heart on the issue and that he wanted the same thing as I did. I can remember that sense of joy, that hope, the plans. Things haven’t quite gone to plan since then.

So far we’ve had numerous investigations which have all proved completely normal, I can’t decide if it’s a blessing or a curse. In some ways it would be easier if they could find something wrong so that I could have some understanding of why I’m still childless when so many other people around me seen to fall pregnant so easily. On the other hand when it comes to IVF it’s a good thing that as far as I know there’s nothing there that makes it less likely to succeed. So because there’s no reason evident for why I’m not getting pregnant the only treatment we have been offered in 3 years is 6 months’ of Clomid tablets – a drug that stimulates ovulation, ordinarily used for people who aren’t ovulating. The NICE guidelines don’t actually recommend this for unexplained infertility anymore but our health trust still give it as they feel that sometimes it is of benefit. My suspicion is that it’s also good for women’s mental health to at least have something to try because if I’d gone 3 years and they couldn’t even offer me any treatment I might have come even closer to cracking up! Still, it didn’t work for me, something that was a big struggle as I think I’d put my hopes in it because I knew that it had worked for my mum. Even that seems like a crazily long time ago now though, well over a year.

I’ve felt like the whole infertility journey so far has been a practice in maintaining sanity, it would be so easy to let it consume you. I feel like my challenge each day, each month, is to try and just stay happy, just enjoy life even if it’s not what I had planned at the moment. I’ve spent 3 years trying to stay calm, not to panic and to relax. I think I’ve done a fairly good job really. It hasn’t been easy and there’s been a lot of tears, usually at completely unpredictable moments, I can be feeling fine one minute then something will trigger a thought, whether it’s an advert, a picture of facebook, finding out somebody’s pregnant, another unwelcome period, and suddenly I’m in floods of tears; But as a generalisation I feel like I’ve coped ok.

In some ways I feel better now than I have for at least a year if not more. The first year we had hope that things might just happen, towards the end of that year we had hope for the appointments at the infertility clinic giving answers. For a while I had some hope that the Clomid tablets might work. For the last year the hope that I might just fall pregnant has pretty much evaporated. It’s certainly not impossible, I know a few people where this has happened but still by this point I’ve pretty much given up hoping. People might say it took ‘so and so’ 3 years to get pregnant and look at the little one now, this offers a little bit of hope that maybe things will work out like them, but most of the time it feels entirely irrelevant because it only highlights a possibility, the possibility that things might work out for us as it did for them, but then all the other possibilities, all the ‘maybe this month’s’ that I’ve experienced over the last 3 years have been disappointed so I’ve lost faith in betting on possibilities. After the Clomid didn’t work there was nothing else the fertility clinic could offer us until it had been 3 years so the last year has been a very long and difficult wait and while I find out person after person that I know has fallen pregnant it’s been tough. At least now I have something to focus on, some small ray of hope that is IVF, some chance that it may work and I’ll get what I’ve always wanted. More than that at least in the next 18 months I’ll know either way. If the IVF doesn’t work it will be absolutely devastating, I can’t imagine what we might go through, the ups the downs, the tears, the disappointments, the pain. I don’t mean physical pain, I’m not really looking forward to that, injecting myself with hormones day after day, people sticking massive needles in sensitive places, my eggs being harvested, it doesn’t sound very pleasant but I’m really not that bothered about it, maybe it’s because I’m a nurse I’m a bit more relaxed about that side of things. It’s the emotional pain that I’m worried about, I have some inkling for what a roller-coaster the next 18 months is going to be. All the possibilities spin round in my head all the time, it works – unbelievable joy, it doesn’t work – devastating, it works – worry, what if I miscarry, it works and I do miscarry – utter devastation, it works – unbelievable joy again. I know lots of people would tell me, you’ve got to stay positive and urge me not to think about the negative possibilities but I have to prepare myself mentally and working through those possibilities is my way of doing that. I’m trying not to be unduly negative or unduly positive but focus and balance myself as much as I can for whatever may lay ahead, at the end of the day there’s pretty much a 50/50 possibility that it will work.

So my mission for this year is to stay sane, no matter what, through what I feel is the conclusion to our infertility journey. Either it works in the free attempts that I’m lucky to be offered on the NHS, or it doesn’t work and we take a different path and adopt, either way in 18 months I’ll know. So this blog is my way of trying to work through it, a means of keeping my sanity and perhaps helping other people in the same situation but who don't feel able to be so open about it, to know they’re not alone. I’ll finish with a song, there’s a few songs that have resonated with me a lot over the last 3 years and that I’ve listened to repeatedly when I’m feeling hopeful or feeling down, but this is probably the one I’ve listened to most. It’s not actually about hoping, nor is it about despair, it’s about what I’ve just been saying, trying to stay sane, stay myself, regardless.

That I Would Be Good – Alanis Morissette