New Year, New Hope

Happy New Year to you all; I hope you all had a great time over the festivities!

We had such a great Christmas and New Year with family and friends, despite initially dreading it.  However, I kept myself busy by hosting Christmas this year so took great delight in getting the house all organised and cooking up a feast! Our plan for New Year was to stay close to home; I always find New Year such an emotional time anyway, especially when I hear the traditional Scottish hogmanany tune of Auld Lang Syne. There’s something about that song that just makes me weep and I was so scared of breaking down with memories of what we had so nearly had in 2017. However, my mum and dad suggested we go over to their house which we did and we ended up having a lovely evening with mum and dad, one of my brothers and one of my nieces. We had a beautiful roast dinner, played games, had some drinks and then rang the bells in together. I was quite proud of myself that when the time came I managed to swallow down my emotions and we got through it with lots of laughs as usual. And just like that, Christmas and New Year were over with lots of happy memories made once again.

What made our New Year even better was that on New Year’s Eve Dave surprised me with a trip to Paris in February! Paris is somewhere I have dreamt about since I was a little girl and have always wanted to visit but surprisingly have never been despite it only being a couple of hours flight from the UK. When I think about it now, I think I’ve been waiting to go with that very special person at a very special time. And right now seems to be that time where we need a good distraction and some cheering up as we have started 2018 feeling quite overwhelmed that we have no set plan in place with regards to more IVF.

After the miscarriage we agreed to have a break, which has been really great as at the time I couldn’t even contemplate doing another cycle. I thought as time went on I would come round to the idea of going back and trying again, but the opposite seems to have happened. The longer I’ve been away and got back to some sort of normality, the more I fear going back again. I absolutely dread putting not only our emotions through that again, but also my body. Even now I’m still suffering effects – your body is completely taken over and it take months to get that control back again. The thought of going back through all that again is a scary thought; never mind all the additional worry and stress of another possible miscarriage.

Dave and I have talked all this through and he completely understands my reservations. However, despite everything I’ve said, I’m also not sure I’m ready to give up just yet. We’ve done two cycles, one negative, one positive (which turned into a negative), so I do feel we have something to work with. The clinic say the fact I got pregnant is a huge positive and should definitely give us hope for another round, and I know they’re right. If we give up after two rounds I know a part of me will always wonder what might have happened if we’d given it just one more go. Of course the catch-22 is that we could say the same after round three, or round four and then before you know it we could be on our tenth cycle! We know there comes a point where you have to draw a line under it; we just don’t think we’re there yet.

Another thing we have revisited is adoption. We had always thought ourselves open to this as an option after IVF if we’d exhausted all our opportunities there. However after the miscarriage we spoke about it again and decided it wasn’t for us. I think coming so close to having a child of our own made us realise if we couldn’t have that, we didn’t want anything. However, as the weeks have gone on we’ve started to have a change of heart again and have been speaking about it more often. And then strangely enough when we went to a New Year’s party I ended up sitting next to a woman who works for an adoption charity. I started asking her lots of questions about her work and she wanted to know why I was so curious so I ended up telling her our story. We spoke for a long time and she really made me think about adoption differently. I mentioned to her the fears I have regarding adoption and she immediately alleviated them, telling me you only ever hear the horror stories, most cases actually work out very well. She told me some lovely stories about children she had placed with families and it really made so happy to hear that kids who so desperately just needed some love, have found their happy ever after.

I’m a big believer in fate and I feel like maybe there was a reason we ended up sitting next to each other at the party and chatting. Who knows. It’s definitely something to think about.

For the meantime, however, we are just going to wait and see what happens. We should be hearing from the clinic within the next month or so to tell us we’re at the top of the NHS waiting list, and then we’ll make a decision whether to go for another cycle or whether we need more time. Until then, it’s all about Paris…….