Throughout this time, we had the obvious and intrusive questions from people asking “When are you having a baby?”, “No baby yet?”, “You better get a move on, you’re not getting any younger”… yes I actually had that said to me on more than one occasion. These questions never got easier to dodge, and as time moved on and the desperation for a baby got more intense, these questions were often followed by having to make an excuse as to why we don’t have a baby yet and a quick run into the bathroom for a tearful outburst. I will never understand why people feel the need to ask these questions, maybe it’s because I know first hand how painful they can be, but it really is no one’s business. You never know what’s happening in someone’s life. Infertility comes in many forms, and can cause a couple or an individual great pain and anguish. Hence why people need to be more open about their fertility, once you start talking you quickly realise how many people have been affected by infertility in one way or another.
Once we started having the various fertility tests, I started to become more open about it. I was fed up of dodging the questions, so I would tell them that we were pursing IVF. This usually got greeted by an embarrassed face and then some unwanted advice. This may make me sound a bit bitter, but the last thing a person facing infertility needs is advice from someone who “just had to look at their partner and got pregnant” – again, I’ve had this said to me more then once. My biggest advice to someone who knows someone who is going through infertility is to just ask if they want to talk about it, and listen. We have talked to enough doctors, and done enough Google searches and research, that we don’t need more advice.
You can assume we have tried everything including “trying to relax, and it will just happen”. Which is single handedly the WORST thing you can say, and you can guarantee that person has been told to “just relax” so many times. The best thing I did was start an anonymous Instagram account, where I befriended many women going through the same journey. This gave me the opportunity to learn from these women as well as moan and open up about how hard i was finding everything.
After 6.5 years, we were diagnosed with Unexplained Infertility and I started IVF, and after months of self injecting hormones, scans and invasive procedures, I finally got to see those 2 pink lines on a pregnancy test that I had been so desperate to see all these years. I was incredibly blessed for this to have worked first time. So I am now writing this while 6 months pregnant, which I honestly had started to believe would never happen for me. So I hope there are people reading this using it as a beacon of hope in their fertility journey. Don’t give up, and know you are not alone. Oh, and it’s ok to curse people behind their backs when they ask you invasive questions or tell you to “just relax”.
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