It’s ok not to be ok

There’s no doubt about it, infertility is hard. I always try my best to keep things in perspective by comparing myself with the millions of other people in life who are far worse off than us, who are dealing with unimaginable pain, loss and heartache. This usually results in me berating myself for moaning at all about our infertility as that aside, our life is great and we’re blessed in so many ways.

However, one thing I’ve learned throughout our journey is to not compare it with others. Yes there are far worse off people than us, but it doesn’t make what we’re going through any less hard. As the saying goes, until you’ve walked in someone else’s shoes, you have no idea what they’re going through.

And to be totally frank, it’s been a difficult time for me lately. I always say to Dave 80% of our life is absolutely brilliant, and 20% is taken up with our infertility battle and all the heartache and worry that go along with that. But it always amazes me how that 20% can completely overwhelm everything else and make it seem like that’s all that matters. And for the past few months I’ve unfortunately let everything get on top of me and my mental and physical health has been suffering.

Since our miscarriage I’ve been troubled with pretty bad anxiety. Just a general feeling that everything was going to go wrong again; perfectly normal after a miscarriage my GP told me. With her amazing support, after a couple of months I began to feel like myself again. However, once we returned from our trip to Paris, we had a big decision to make as to whether we were going to do another cycle of IVF. My overriding feeling was that I couldn’t face it. But what then? Were we just going to draw a line under it and accept we would never be parents? That wasn’t something either of us could contemplate. With a little bit of hope left in us and the fear of having regrets later in the life, we made the decision to go ahead with round 3.

Unfortunately, however, with that looming over my head, everything started to go wrong. I kept trying to think positively that it would work this time, but the negative feelings kept getting in the way. What if it didn’t work? What if it did but we had another miscarriage? There are so many variables of what could happen, and only a 20% chance that I could actually have a healthy pregnancy that resulted in a live baby. Those terrible odds were always at the forefront of my mind and I just couldn’t quite believe that it was my destiny never to be a mother. How could that be? How could I go through the rest of my life without having children? Am I being punished for something I’ve done in a previous life? Why has this happened to us?

After a couple of months of withholding feelings like this, it has now all crumbled round about me. Not only is my mental health hugely suffering but now so is my physical health. My GP says to carry so much stress and worry around is very unhealthy and she’s not surprised I’ve started to suffer in various places in my body. For a long time I’ve tried to put a brave face on things and smile in front of my family and friends with poor Dave the only one who has truly known what has been going on. Thankfully for me he is an amazing husband and has been a huge pillar of support for me. I really couldn’t ask for a better partner in life, but after discussing things this week we have decided it’s best to postpone the IVF cycle just now. To do a third cycle we really need to give it as much commitment as we can, as we always said 3 would be the maximum we would do, so there’s no point going into the cycle when I’m feeling this bad, as IVF is bad enough on its own, never mind when you’re also carrying around a lot of internal and external pain and anxiety. So we have been in contact with the fertility clinic and have said we will just be back in touch when we’re ready to begin. We have no idea at the moment when that will be.

To be honest, despite always being very open and candid in my blog posts, I’m very nervous to share this one; I guess I’m scared of being judged. But one thing I’ve learned is that it’s ok not to be ok. You don’t have to be brave all the time; we all have times in life when we fall but we WILL get back up again and it WILL be ok. I’m confident that with some time, rest and TLC, Dave and I will get there, wherever ‘there’ is meant to be.