2 other pieces of mine have been published in the last few months over at The Spinoff Parents.
If you’d like to read them, they are below:
How to support your friends and loved ones who are struggling with infertility
An IVF journey: A mother writes to the baby she hopes to have
If you’d like to keep up with all of my work, please visit my Facebook page, always linked at the top.
Thanks, as always, for supporting my writing. ❤
Wow, hard to believe it’s been 2 months since I wrote here – and for that, I can only apologise. Everything has been very slow, in all parts of our lives. We are in a holding pattern.
It is frustrating, but we’re getting there.
We were close to having a job for the Mr, but then it fell through. Then we were getting ready to move into our new home, but decided to let the current tenants stay until the end of May to help them out – which ultimately with the job situation has ended up being a very good idea.
We are circling, floating. Time is one big long stretch to me right now, with no real routine or order to it. For someone who is a big planner, this is frustrating. There is always another week to wait, another month to sort things, more dates in the diary. It feels like progress some days, but others it feels like we’re standing still.
I don’t want to wish the year away, and I pride myself on being patient as much as I can be. But the waiting gets hard.
I have no real update to give you on our IVF/infertility situation. We are getting closer, I promise, and I’ll reveal what’s been happening soon. It’s such a crapshoot, trying to manipulate science into what should be natural – and is natural for what seems like everyone else.
We’ve been collecting treasures and pieces for our new home and are getting excited to get in there. Hopefully we’ll be undertaking some renovations before we move in, kicking off with a new fence in the coming weeks (with the permission of the kind tenants). At least we have progress to look forward to.
In positive news, the weather has been kind to us, in short moments. Locals have found it very frustrating but accept that they live in a town where the conditions change by the half-hour. As two ex-Scotland-dwellers, we’re happy to see the sun. Lots of swimming for us. We don’t feel 100% like locals yet, but we will.
I send good thoughts your way on whatever you may be dealing with this month. Soon it will be autumn, and soon we will have some answers. We’re just being swept along for the ride right now, and right now, that’s okay.
Pals, I need to quit Google.
We’re getting close to making progress on the next steps in our treatment and I just can’t. stop. looking. up. shit.
I thought I’d be excited and looking forward to it all but I’m more anxious than anything. I have written a list of questions for the clinic, and looked at possible dates for protocols. We’ve decided I may not work until we’re through with this first cycle of IVF – we’re putting a lot of money and time and energy on the line to try and make this self-funded cycle successful and decided that a few more weeks without me earning a salary is not going to bankrupt us. We are so lucky to be in this position. I never thought I’d be able to afford to not work for a few months, let alone pay for a cycle of IVF. We’re so grateful, and we need to throw everything we can at this cycle.
So do I have an update? Not really. It has been a strange transition back to life here. I feel like we never left in a way, but in other moments I feel so lost and foreign back here. I don’t know where anything is, I don’t understand some of the systems in place, and we’re grown adults living upstairs at my folks’ place. It’s weird.
We’ve been up north for a week or so having time with family, but we’re heading back to our family home soon. We’ve started looking at the job listings, made a few plans for our home that we move into in April, and set up bank accounts for D and a new phone number for me. Progress.
I do miss our home. And then I remember that it’s not our home anymore. 8 years is a big chunk of your life and it feels like we left in such a blur of stress and sadness and activity. Our friends are only an internet link away, but it is confusing and unsettling. We want to be here, but we want to be there.
I guess that’s how it will always be.
I’ll write soon with further updates on how things are progressing, but there may not be too much detail for a while – some things we need to keep to ourselves. But I hope that I’ll still be able to make you feel you’re not alone – this infertility business cuts you to the bone and it’s all you can do some days to keep your head above water.
Keep swimming.
Well here we are. 2017. The new year.
A year of change; a year of possibilities and hope.
We’re in New Zealand now and it still feels surreal. It still feels like one of our usual visits, when we spend 3-4 weeks living in this house and then get on very long flights “home” again. I still catch myself calling Scotland home when I refer to it. I’ll need to change that.
This is home now.
In other developments, we are seeing the new RE/specialist at the end of the month, and we’ll also need to get a GP soon (we’re hoping to get into my old family practice). We’re not sure how quickly things will move forward, but it’s good to have a plan. If I’ve learned anything over the last year it’s that nothing in infertility happens in a hurry.
I’m hoping this will be our year. If nothing else progresses but we end up moving towards parenthood, then it’ll be a good one.
No resolutions this year. Just small changes and everything crossed.
I think it was the illustrious TV personality Dr Phil who first called them “tapes” (though I struggle to find anything online to corroborate this) and it’s become what I call them, too.
Tapes. It’s an outdated term for sure, as who listens to tapes anymore? But whenever my mind starts to repeat something negative to me, I try and tell myself to stop the tape.
My mind has not been kind to me lately.
I get the same messages in a loop when I’m feeling down. Everything from “no one really likes you” and “you just annoy people” to “you’ll never be a mother” and “why bother eating healthy foods when you’re just gonna stay fat anyway?”
Most days I can tell these thoughts to fuck off. On good days I can roll my eyes at them and remind myself how much I like myself, how my friends don’t find me annoying (and if they do, then maybe I don’t need to stick by them – I mean, I know I have flaws, but I’m likeable) and how I can definitely become a mother somehow. And I’m not fat, I’m just on the chubby side and need to eat less sugar mainly because it makes me cranky, and start to actually listen to my body when it tells me how angry dairy makes it.
On bad days it’s hard to just get going on things. I get the bare minimum done and hope that I don’t run into too many pregnant women at the shops.
Positivity goes a really long way. It’s just that over the last 18 months, with work and life stresses, I’ve been less and less positive. And I’ve written before about feeling like a failure. My mind can be very cruel, and I think obviously a large part of it is that I’m constantly hit in the face by everyone else’s seemingly-hyperfertile reproductive systems. It’s human nature that we are rapidly reproducing, and there are very little places you can go without seeing a baby or a bump.
For me it’s become all about taking deep breaths, telling myself it’ll pass and that I don’t need to listen to the negativity inside. And sometimes someone else has the tape player and can shut it off for you, just by reaching out to check in, or reminding you how much hope there still is.
Press stop if you can. Don’t let those tapes run. And on the worst days? Aim for pause.
So we’re still in limbo. As I said in an earlier post, we’re waiting til we get home to proceed with anything.
It’s a weird place to be in, and coincides with being in limbo in so many areas of our lives. We can’t sell the house til the bathroom is fixed. We can’t plan when we leave the UK until I know what’s happening with my work. We can’t have a baby until we pay to make one.
Life is weird, guys.
It’s kinda nice to not be trying, though. We’re just relaxing and enjoying ourselves and that’s a good part of it. I do panic a bit that we’re not taking our vitamins reliably – it’s a help to both of us if we remember to do it, particularly as it takes 90 days to be truly effective and all that.
In other news, autumn is basically here. It’s definitely getting cooler and the leaves are changing.
Life keeps changing, and I keep running to keep up.
So I think we’ve decided to wait until New Zealand to proceed with fertility treatments. This is both a good and bad thing.
I mean, I should be happy that on top of my awful work environment and trying to sell our house (and we now need insurance repairs to the bathroom), I don’t have to add IVF. But my heart hurts from waiting this long and I wonder just how much more I have in me.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s not long. If we can get our results from here and get an appointment in NZ when we get there, in theory we could move forward in February/March. 6 months seems interminable at times, but it’s not forever. It’s just the not knowing. It seems unbearable to think of waiting 2 years to have a child, which is why we’re going private for at least 1 cycle, but it’s painful and scary to think of all the reasons it’ll go wrong (it may not work at all, we may not have any embryos afterwards to freeze and will have to have a whole fresh cycle, they’ll find something else wrong…) and that we’ll possibly spend $14,000 on a failure, then the following 2 cycles (public funding) will fail too and we’re at a dead end in terms of having biological children.
This is my brain 18 hours a day right now, people.
I’m my own worst enemy – don’t think I’m not aware of how ridiculous I come across sometimes. It’s just all I can think about. It’s all I want. We should be able to do this natural thing that keeps our species going and we’re just big fat failures at it, while those who don’t want children or mistreat them get pregnant on a whim or a bender.
(I am not here to judge your personal choices but I’m allowed to occasionally be bitter).
All I can do is try and breathe. Some days it feels impossible. Some days it really feels like no one cares. Some days I want to go buy all the baby things and make plans and prepare for our future kids and other days I just think all of that is a big fat mistake, and I’m just not meant to have children. What do you do when you feel your life’s purpose is impossible?
I looked up adoption on the weekend. I just… I dunno.
It’s a mind fuck. It’s unfair. It’s hard. It’s all-encompassing. And with everything else going on right now, it feels too much.
Just get me to New Zealand, please. Get me out of this job, out of our messy and broken house, away from this feeling.
Deep breath. In… out.
So we went into our specialist appointment on Tuesday with me expecting them to say, “you need IVF with ICSI”, and walked out after they’d said exactly that.
Unfortunately, our results were worse than we knew, and ICSI is much more viable an option than standard IVF. The specialist actually said, “They’re asleep” about the last SA. So there’s that. At least I could laugh.
Luckily hormone levels are normal and so was genetic/chromosomal testing which was a big relief.
I have been told to lose weight (just so that I’m a bit further clear of the 30 BMI limit – I’m currently at 29.9), eat healthy, exercise, keep trying naturally as sometimes things happen, but otherwise they’ve put us on the 12 month waiting list for NHS-funded ICSI. With the move to NZ in December so we also enquired about self-funded here, which we could get on with pretty much straight away, but it’s £5k. We’d be happy to do it but if we had any frozen embryos I wouldn’t know how to even start with getting them transferred to NZ…
We think we’ll get on NZ waiting lists when we get there and self-fund 1 cycle while we wait (doesn’t affect your place on the list). If it fails, we have 2 free cycles to fall back on. That’s $12k NZD out of our savings, but if it comes down to that or a new bathroom in the house, I choose a baby. I’d rather have a baby to wash in the sink, than a nice bathroom with no baby to bathe.
It does mean this wait before we can even get started. I feel like I’ve spent the last 5-7 years waiting. I’ve been wanting a baby for such a long time, and with the heartbreak of the last 18 months, it’s tough to think of waiting another 2 years to possibly hold a baby in my arms. Hence, yes, money. We’re very lucky that we’ll soon be in the position to afford these things thanks to the house sale* and a possible payout from work**.
We knew this was coming and I had done all of the research and resigned myself to it being the diagnosis but none of that has made me feel any better. We now need to make some tough decisions.
Our options are:
My heart really wants option 1 but I know with the stress of everything, option 2 is really the best idea. We’re still discussing and thinking and trying to keep our heads up.
The next step is to tell our families.
Sometimes I feel like giving up.
Like. I veer so wildly between feeling like there’s always hope, and feeling like this is never going to happen, so why torture myself?
I dunno. Ask me throughout my cycle and it depends on how many articles I’ve read lately – how many positive, how many negative. I feel like we’ve been doing this forever, and we’re surrounded by babies. With one coming every month at the moment to close friends.
I’m so tired.
On the positive side, our fertility clinic appointment is Tuesday. So at least we’ll get some answers, advice… maybe even a plan. I just want them to give me some hope.
But yes. Today feels hopeless. Today I feel like giving up. But I don’t think I ever could. This means more to me than anything else.
Hug your babies tight, please. Love on them. Appreciate them. You don’t know how lucky you are.
We’ve been keeping busy. Between getting the house ready and work dramas and weddings, we’ve been able to keep our mind (mostly) off of all things baby.
The nights are long and the rain has held off lately (well, in the evenings) which means we’ve been taking walks. I’ve got a Fitbit Charge HR now and I’m trying to hit those 10,000 steps. Every little bit will help with getting healthier/increasing my fertility chances.
I swither between reading articles about how people get pregnant all the time with low chances, and feeling like I shouldn’t even hope for it, really. It’s also best not to dwell on the amount of people who have conceived and given birth within the time period that we’ve just been trying.
We’re strongly considering private treatment, regardless. It looks like we could go on the waiting list for publicly-funded treatment but also get some private treatment while we wait, if we wanted. Once we have the appointment here in Edinburgh, I’ll try and request our medical records so that we can continue in NZ without too much faff. We need to know if IUI is a plausible option, or whether IVF/ICSI is the situation. Hopefully his test results will be better next time as we’ve been working on being healthier and he is taking all the vitamins I’m making him take..
Our long walks have been great, though. It’s been a while since we’ve talked for long stretches of time and not watched TV every night. Our TV is broken, but that’s not the point. We’ve also been talking lately about the dogs we might get when we get to NZ, and in the months since we were in Greece (only 2, feels like forever!) we’ve basically decided on the names for our future children, which is, y’know, weird and sad and hopeful and lovely and gah. Too many emotions.
But yes, we are making progress with things. The house should be on the market soon, the visa preparations for the move are underway, and I’m basically waiting to be made redundant so we can take that payout and run with it.
I hope you are doing well. All of my infertility buddies. Sending hugs out into the world.
koru and thistle 