This is my first proper blog post.
I suspect that I’m supposed to open with something profound and philosophical but the truth is… I’m just a bit lost. I don’t mean in terms of the blogosphere – sure there’s that too – but I’m lost trying to navigate my way through a journey I never thought I’d have to make. The journey of infertility. I like to call it a journey because we (my wonderful husband and I) are lucky enough to still have options available to us and a vaguely clear idea about the direction we’re heading in. Our next stop, which has been looming ever closer for a while now, is IVF.
Struggling to conceive has invaded my life…………..and my body. If you witnessed how completely at home and comfortable I now am dropping my knickers and cartwheeling into a pair of leg stirrups so that a MALE doctor wearing a head torch can shove an assortment of instruments inside me, you’d be horrified. If you saw the inside of my bathroom cabinet you’d be forgiven for assuming it was the cupboard of a well-stocked meth laboratory. And if you rifled through my camera roll, well, you’d be treated to an embarrassing photo shoot of negative pregnancy tests. I don’t keep them – that would be madness, I just photograph them from different angles and play with the lighting to make absolutely sure I haven’t misread the test window before I throw them away. Totally normal.
I’ve spent the last couple of years in a perpetual state of feeling on the very cusp of a pregnancy. Initially, making plans further than a few weeks in the future was beyond the realms of my capability. Any invitation catapulted my thoughts to all kinds of pregnancy related considerations:
I’ll almost definitely be pregnant by that date…
In fact I’m probably pregnant right now…
It’s entirely possible that I might actually be in labour on the day of this event…
I’ll have to decline. Given that I am… you know… with child.
Later down the line, my mentality shifted and I started actively agreeing to plans that I knew wouldn’t be possible if I became pregnant. I guess I was tempting fate… but fate was not tempted. It is precisely this mentality that landed me in a god awful 100 mile bike ride which, at the time of agreeing to, I had felt certain wouldn’t be something I was able to participate in owing to the fertilization I anticipated taking place in the lead up.
So as you can tell, rather than being prepared for IVF, I feel completely overwhelmed and astonished that this is where we’re at. I’ve had my moments of anger, sadness and jealousy but mostly I have just felt incredibly lonely – isolated at the hand of my empty womb. I don’t want to feel like this is a secret anymore so I’ve decided to take a brave (foolish?) plunge and write about it all instead.
So somewhere in the middle of my complicated emotional state (fuelled by the cocktail of hormones soaring through my blood stream) I birthed this little blog. Pun intended.