So...infertility sucks

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I’ve thought about starting this thread for a while but it always felt too personal. But today I just want to talk about it.

About a year ago my doctor told my husband and I that we need to hurry up if we really want children, because he highly suspects that I’m going through the first stages of Premature Ovarian Failure. It’s kind of like menopause, just really early and for different reasons. Needless to say, no baby yet.

I feel so sad sometimes, but then I kind of feel almost happy because I worry what if it really isn’t practical to have a baby right now in the middle of money and debt and job issues. Maybe it’s a “good” thing after all. And then I feel guilty for even thinking that.

My best friend on the planet has never wanted children and has only been married a few months. She came over for lunch the other day to tell me that she’s expecting a baby in March. I did not know it was possible to feel so very overjoyed and fiercely jealous about the same thing at the same time.

2

I’m so sorry you have to deal with this. I can’t offer you any solutions, but I’m here to listen.

3

I’m so incredibly sorry you are going though this. Please feel no obligation to respond, but if you don’t mind me asking, how old are you, and do you have other children? I just turned 28, and had a scare a couple months ago. I am not even married, but it was one probably the most heart wrenching experience I’ve ever been through. I never realized how important it was to me until then.
Sending good vibes your way.

4

I feel ya Jelymag. Totally, and I’m sorry you’re going through this too.

I’m 37 and we’ve been trying for 11+ years. I’ve had 3 miscarriages, failed treatments, and countless surgeries.

The only thing I’ve ever really wanted was to be pregnant and have a baby.

I’m at the point now where if it doesn’t happen in the next year or two, we’re done trying. We’ll think about going another route, and see where that goes.

Good luck to you. If you ever need to “talk”, feel free to send me a PM.

5

I very much don’t want to hurt or offend, and I know it isn’t the same thing at all, but I’ve given up the idea of having biological children and though there’s hope for me yet (I could always be miraculously diagnosed with a non-genetic disease and cured), I’ve been trying to come to peace with never being able to be pregnant and breast feed a child.

I find it helps a great deal to believe in me being able to be okay regardless, that I’ll find a way to get my kiddie-fix even if I can’t even adopt or foster children. I also focus on the positives of adopting kids/not having any at all/not ever being pregnant, and I find this helps. What helps the most is to remember that people who adopt kids say that you feel the same about them regardless how you got them, and I find that very reassuring. For now, at least.

I know stress plays a minor supporting role in infertility, and maybe kind of giving up on getting biological kids and getting used to the idea of alternatives would actually wind up helping you get pregnant and in any case would ease your worry and pain. Or maybe that’s really really stupid and offensive. I hope not, and I’m really sorry you’re going through this and hope you’re able to have kids.

6

Thank you, ivylass.

AmberLee, I’m 29. No children or pregnancies to date. It’s almost certainly the result of having had cancer when I was a child. Apparently chemotherapy is not the ovary’s friend.
Thank you for the good vibes.

I’m so sorry, Lady Venom. Thank you for your kind words.

Thank you for your advice, supergoose. I do appreciate it.

7

I’m sorry. Mother Nature can be a monstrously unfair bitch. I wish there were some way to do reproductive tract transplants–I’d give mine to my poor sister in law, cause I sure ain’t gonna use it. She desperately wants another baby, and they’ve been trying a couple of years now. But she has really, really awful endometriosis and she’s been strongly encouraged to have a therapeutic hysterectomy. She won’t, of course, because it would be the end of any hopes she still has. So she lives with the physical pain of the endo, and the mental pain of the infertility and there’s not a damn thing any of us can do to help her on either front.

And no, chemo and radiation are not kind to the ovaries. But you know, the people who love you would a billion times rather have you alive and infertile than dead and with undamaged ovaries.

8

It was just about the last thing I wanted to hear when I was going through it, and it was the thing every man and his dog made a point to tell me. It’s also completely untrue - as dangermom (I think?) has pointed out in these threads in the past, the conception rates for those who stop trying and look to alternatives are the same as for those who keep trying. Sorry, but I hated hearing that so much that it still rankles.

My heart goes out to you, Jelymag. Been there, done that, still bear the scars. I wish you all the very best.

9

I’m very sorry to have said it, then. Good information to know, though I’m sorry it came at the expense of those in/reading this thread. (If you’ll forgive a bit of humor, you could think of it as having taken the bullet for any infertile people I might have unknowingly said it to in the future.)

10

My heart goes out to you Jelymag… it’s unfair, unjust, unexpected and lots of other uns. After 7 years of infertility workup and treatments we were told there was nothing else to be done and were devastated. (In vitro fertilization was not easily available 35 years ago) All of the pain of not being able to experience pregnancy, watching my friends and relatives reproduce like rabbits, and enduring well intended but extremely painful comments vanished when the hospital staff placed our three day old adopted son in my arms. Both of my kids are adopted and I love them with all my heart and soul… I would lay down my life for either of them. Adoption isn’t for everyone, I suppose, and it takes time to realize and accept that your ultimate goal is to have a baby, a child to love and raise… not a mini-me. (And I apologize if, at this early stage, adoption stories are not what you want to hear… I remember being there too) (((hugs)))

11

That would be Dangerosa who has two kids, one adopted, one bio, and has told her story at greater depth in the past.

12

Thanks** Eureka**, I realised it was Dangerosa about 6 minutes after I posted, but having missed the edit window I figured someone would be along to correct me :smiley:

And thanks for understanding supergoose. Infertility pushed me to the edge, so having well-meaning friends and family say that to me just sent me insane. What you’re trying to say “There’s still hope! Maybe a small change in your life will make it all better! This can still happen for you!”, but what I was hearing is “This is your fault! You are causing this yourself because you’re freakishly obsessed by it! Everyone else can just do it, but you have to go and get so worked up about it that you can’t even perform a simple biological function!”. Besides, we’d established that it was a birth defect that was causing my husband’s problems and all the stress in the world wasn’t going to change that one iota, but my MIL would still break out the “Don’t stress and you’ll magically fall pregnant” line every time we saw her and that would just grate on my nerves.

13

Jelymag, I’m so sorry for that.

My wife and I had difficulty conceiving. I don’t want to offer any false hope, but I do think it should be pointed out that IVF has come a long way in just 10-15 yrs. Imagine how much science can progress in the future.

FWIW, my wife had problems with her fallopian tubes. She was 35 when she got pregnant. It was an awful, awful process full of disappointments…but at the end of it all we got a beautiful little boy. Subsequent attempts have all failed.

14

The best thing I did for myself when I was going through fertility treatment was to make non-child-related goals for myself in case it never happened (and it didn’t).

15

So sorry to hear of yet another person going through the personal hell that is infertility. My husband and I have been dealing with this for 3 years and can attest to how all consuming it becomes. We’ve lost ‘friends’ over it, and it was my own personal obsession for about 2 of those 3 years.

If you are worried about those feelings of ambivalence you are having, I would say that you shouldn’t and that it’s normal. Throughout all of this, my feelings on the subject have gone full circle. The desperation to have a child, the jealousy and guilt when good friends ‘fall’ pregnant with ease (god, how I hate that expression), the thoughts of ‘well, maybe this isn’t a bad thing because I get to spend more time with my husband, just the two of us’, all the way to ‘well, maybe I don’t want children after all’.

I have a little secret as well. We’ve just gone through our first cycle of IVF, and I appear to be pregnant (for the first time ever). I’m still trying not to be ambivalent about the whole thing. I’m not leaping in the air with joy. I think that was sucked out of me about a year ago, around the time I lost perspective on everything. It’s strange, but it just feels like we’ve been trying too long and had too many negatives to get excited about this just yet. I hope this changes soon.

All I can say is that it is a lot to deal with, and most people, however well-meaning, just don’t get it. Yes, sure, there are worse things in the world that people go through (this was told to me a few times - ha! that really helps), but to me, this was the one of the hardest I, personally, have had to go through (and I’ve done the childhood cancer thing too). So yeah, it sucks. Mightily.

One thing I would say, by the way, is that for me, dealing with the infertility and deciding to go through fertility treatment was way harder than actually going through IVF. IVF was a relative breeze. I know most things you read tell you about how difficult IVF is for people, but for me it really wasn’t too bad. I really felt like I could do it a few times, if I had to. Maybe I’m just strange! And as **leander **says, thing are progressing quickly in reproductive medicine. Our clinic has a 50% success rate for IVF and the under 35 age group, which is fantastic. New freezing technology is being refined which give you even more of a chance, should you have embryos to freeze. It’s amazing, sometimes, what they can do.

16

Slow news time sometimes leads to having lots of Stupid on the news, sometimes to learning things you wouldn’t have learned otherwise.

There was a bit on last week about the “fertility preservation treatments” being performed to try and get people who get cancer being very young to be able to have kids (extraction, freezing and reimplantation of ovarian and testicular tissue). I realize it’s not any helpful to the OP, but I thought I’d mention it here so people who know a young cancer patient are aware of those.

I feel for you, Jelymag, and hope you can someday hold a child of your own in your arms.

17

Yes. Yes, it does.

I just started Clomid today…hopefully it works and we catch this cycle. I have a feeling it will, and I’ve had a couple omens that point me in a hopeful direction - but we’ll see.

You are not alone.

Oh - re: the “just stop trying and it’ll happen” bit - that’s one of the reasons we haven’t told hardly anyone that we’re even trying. We would rather go through the painful process alone than deal with the pity and the “sage advice” and the “told you so!” from friends and family.

–Maggie.

18

Yes, this is something I wish I had thought about a bit more. I naively told some friends when we started trying, so 2 years later, it was hard to avoid the questions when they came.

There are several people I now wish we’d never told, precisely because it meant that they felt that could start commenting on our choices, and how we were handling things. This was particularly bad with a childless couple we knew who themselves were not particularly pro-children. It should have seemed obvious we couldn’t trust them and I really regret telling them now.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling that someone is belittling the experience that you are struggling daily to get through. It always amazed me how little compassion some people actually have at times.

(Also just wanted to wish **Oni no Maggie **good luck this cycle. Fingers crossed for you.)

19

This is the awful thing about IVF - you’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s a terrible feeling that lasts right up until the birth.

(In my case, the last few hours were particularly awful, as we had to have an emergency C-section. That was the scariest time of my life.)

And I have the deepest compassion for those people who struggle to have kids and can’t. As someone said upthread, “Mother nature is an unfair bitch”. Lots of useless assholes can have kids, and then there are those who are really capable and loving who have to struggle.

20

Jelymag, I feel for you. Infertility is a horrible thing. My sister is struggling with it at the moment, she and her husband have just started the whole assisted conception thing and it tears at my heart to think of what she has ahead of her. She’s always wanted children, has reams of godchildren and nieces and nephews and has always surrounded herself with children. She’d make a fabulous mother and I pray it happens for her. What really takes the piss is that I have an apparently fully functioning uterus I’m not going to be using, plus I’m ten years younger than she is. She doesn’t know it yet, but as soon as I can go and see her in person I’m going to ask if she’d like to “borrow” it. My brother and his wife also struggled to conceive, but now have two little boys who are beautiful and perfect (well, as perfect as any four and two year olds can be!), so it can and does happen. Also my wonderful partner was conceived through fertility treatment 30 years ago. Amazing things can happen. I hesitate to give any advice as others know do much more than I do, but I do feel for you and hope you and your husband can stay strong and loving each other, and that outcomes will be good for you.