(Oops sorry, I just realised regular readers might have got excited that one of those interminable dates of mine had actually worked out – so apologies if the title of this post got your hopes up, in that particular instance it IS still just me, but who knows what will happen tomorrow/round the corner/when I’m least expecting it? No, in this particular instance, the “it’s not just me” refers to the fact that someone else froze their eggs and wrote about it….)

I wildly applaud anyone writing about the reality of egg freezing so all the cheers and adulation to Eleanor Morgan, who’s written about her experience for the Guardian.

She’s way braver than me, she’s “come out”, ‘fessed up to it under her own name – although me being me, I’d argue that ‘fessing up might be easier if you’ve done it for genuinely medical reasons rather than my slightly wishy-washy “can’t find a man” reasons (but that could just be a little bit of self-loathing leaking out there, and a lot of self-justification about why I’m still anonymous.) And she had it done on the NHS, thus saving herself squillions. (OK, squillions might be an exaggeration, but it was A Lot.)

I know that last paragraph just made me sound like I was jealous of her but I’m really not. Because reading her piece made me realise that even though I whinged about my clinic (and fuck me did I whinge), I was actually very, very lucky that I ended up at a clinic whose approach was very much geared towards a minimal intervention protocol, which meant I didn’t have to take loads of pills like she did, I just injected myself, and I didn’t end up in hospital with ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome.

But for all that as she rightly points out,”every body is different” and “one person’s experience should never be considered an omen for your own”, there was so much of her experience that I DID identify with that my heart properly broke reading that she’d gone through all the downs (and pretty much that’s what it is, just downs, at the time there feel like there aren’t very many, OK any, ups) that I’d also experienced. That thing about knowing it’s about quality not quantity but still feeling sad when you don’t get as many eggs as you hoped; that thing about the tears and potential mental health wobbles; that thing about the loneliness.

And then there was this bit…

I do wish I hadn’t had to spend so much time in the queasy world of fertility forums (where women communicate through infantile acronyms about their DH’s – dear husbands – exchange “babydust” and refer to embryos as “embies”, something artist Polly Morgan wrote about brilliantly), looking for advice

and I just thought “Yes, yes, YES” – only not in a When Harry Met Sally way.

Yes, because I’d also seen that brilliant Polly Morgan piece, cheered her silently for writing it, and thought “I must blog about it.”

Yes, because those ridiculous forums and infuriating DH bullshit was one of the reasons I started this blog in the first place.

And yes, goddammit I need to do far more to publicise this blog than I’m doing at the moment because this blog is for people like Eleanor, and while it wouldn’t have given her all the answers, it might have prepared her for some of the shittier bits and made her feel like she wasn’t on her own.