Discovering IVF: The Others

Infertility can feel extremely isolating at times. You feel like an island, surrounded by a sea positively teeming with fertile couples. You grow incredulous and disbelieving when you hear of couples ‘accidentally’ falling pregnant; surely not?! – When you’ve tried with so much intention and painstaking effort, and yet still failed. And then at some…

Discovering IVF: The Two Week Wait

The Two Week Wait (the wait between the embryo transfer and pregnancy test) could easily be renamed Hell on Earth. Despite everything I had been through up until this point, this was by far the hardest part for me.  It is just the right blend of hope and fear to send a person almost insane….

Discovering IVF: The Numbers

With IVF what you need to know about The Numbers is that they keep getting smaller. Your mantra quickly becomes ‘it only takes 1, we only need 1!’ You awake from the procedure eager to know how many eggs have been gathered. A nurse holds up a clipboard and shows you the number 8, ‘this is…

Discovering IVF: The Egg Collection (featuring The Dressing Gown)

After two days of searching we finally found The Dressing Gown. The weekend before my egg collection was scheduled we went everywhere in search of it. I wouldn’t settle for any old dressing gown, this one had to be just right. Whether it was a hormonal thing, or just a welcome distraction from the impending…

Discovering IVF: The Injections

Injections, injections, injections. There are a lot of them when you’re having IVF, and you have to do almost all of them yourself. Depending on the protocol your clinic decides is best for you (it can be a long or short protocol), and how your body responds to the drugs you may have several weeks…

Discovering IVF: The Scans

Before, when I heard talk of scans, I pictured the fuzzy grey and white of the sonogram image, a tube of jelly and a round ended instrument sliding smoothly across a growing bump. Just pop ‘ultrasound scan’ into a Google image search and you’ll know exactlly what I was picturing! Maybe you do too? Had…

Discovering IVF: The Odds

Until I started to read about IVF (which I did as soon as we learned it was a possibility,) I hadn’t realised quite how stark the odds of success are. Success rates nationally in the UK hover around 20-30%, decreasing as the age of the woman increases (see below.) I was shocked when I learned…

Discovering IVF: The Before

The first thing to realise is that IVF is both the start of something and the end of something. It’s easy to forget that, for most couples, starting IVF treatment is the culmination of an already long journey of trying, and failing, to conceive. It’s also likely to come after multiple tests, investigations and possibly…

Discovering IVF

This time last year we were in the midst of our IVF treatment. Until you are a couple having IVF, you never think that you will be. Or at least I had never thought that I would be. It seemed like something which happened to other people, I had never considered that it would happen…