The Waiting Game

Bloated, exhausted, emotional, and anxious from the Estrace, I wait for day one of my next cycle. I can't help but have that slight hope though that maybe this month will be different and my period will never arrive. You would think that by now, I would have erased this unlikely hope from my monthly repertoire, but I've never quite managed to extinguish it. In all likelihood though, that unwelcome monthly visitor will arrive and this time, instead of just lying around with a heating pad and ibuprofen and naproxen, I'll be injecting myself daily with hormones and preparing for my first IVF attempt. It's terrifying and exciting all at the same time.

My husband feels bad watching how the Estrace alone has impacted me. He feels helpless that he can't take the suffering away from me and that he can't share some of the burden of this process. I think that the partner's suffering in the IVF process is often overlooked and not acknowledged. While I dread the thought of what it might feel like to go through these various alien steps in this procedure, at least I have control because I'm the main attraction in all but one of them. Being a bystander through a process if often worse than being the person at the centre, especially when you love the person you're watching experience everything.

It is difficult for the two of us not to feel alone through this process. As I mentioned before, we don't know anyone personally who has ever gone through this process. Our friends who long ago stopped asking about our odyssey to conceive have largely drifted away, busy with their own lives, and almost none of them know we're even going through IVF. Our families, though supportive of us seeking help for our fertility issues, have had various reactions to the turmoil we have been undergoing through this process ranging from supportive to dismissive to silent. I suppose no one can ever really understand what this process is like unless they have undergone it themselves.

At least we can take comfort knowing that celebrities have publicly gone through this difficult process (since we don't know of any none celebrity who has undergone IVF) and have succeeded in conceiving children, reportedly Chrissy Teigen, Nicole Kidman, Christine Brinkley, Mariah Carey, Emma Thompson, and Celine Dion, among others. So we're not alone, it just feels like it. Lately, some celebrities have started to speak out more about the difficult journey of IVF, such as Maria Menounos and Chrissy Teigen. Perhaps celebrities participating in the dialogue more and raising the profile of processes like IVF will help to extinguish the stigma around fertility issues.

Stay tuned for what happens next (today is day 27 of my cycle, so things are about to get interesting). . . .