(I have a horrible feeling I published this post out of order, so I’ve reordered it — apologies if you already read an earlier iteration and felt you’d missed a bit, you had.)
When the call came, the number wasn’t in my phone, and a donor was the furthest thought from my mind. We’d had generic email updates from the agency keeping us posted about the impact that the pandemic had had on the recruitment of donors and the possibility of treatment delays, but for me, the whole things was sort of mentally parked. There was comfort in knowing that what happened next was in someone else’s hands. There was nothing we could do about it, it was just something that was happening elsewhere that we had no power or control over, all we could do was just get on with our lives. And so we did. Well, as much as anyone could in the middle of a global pandemic.
Category Archives: IVF
The best/weirdest summer ever…
And then, of course, there was the global pandemic.
I almost don’t even know where to start with that. Except that it made me think a few things. Firstly I was SO grateful that we had made the decision to use donor eggs before all this started. As the world ground to a halt and IVF clinics shut down, my heart broke for all the women who had planned an IVF cycle with their own eggs, but had no idea when that would ever be possible again.
Continue readingFresh v frozen, banks v agencies…
I’ve not written since July, and what I wrote in July was months out of date, so as you can imagine, what I’m writing now is even more out of date. But I want it written down. Partly because I feel some sense of duty to you, if you’re still following… because I’ve followed blogs and then they’ve tailed off and I’ve felt a bit, well, cheated, it’s like reading a book that someone never finished writing, or getting a library book and finding someone has ripped the last chapters out so you don’t know how it ends.
Continue readingAnd then I had to come back…
As I mentioned in my last blog (all those months ago), you can’t run away forever, so I got back from running away, and made a decision that I probably wouldn’t have made if I were on my own. I decided to try to find an egg donor.
When I was single and doing this alone, I had pretty much decided that I wasn’t OK with the idea of trying to become a parent of a child that I had no genetic relationship to. I had said — to myself as much as anything — that I might feel differently if I were in a relationship with someone else but that idea was so abstract, I didn’t have to think about Continue reading
I ran away…
I ran away in January. To a place that I didn’t associate with trying and not succeeding. Somewhere I drank wine and stopped worrying about whether I was eating enough vegetables. (I wasn’t.) Somewhere I stopped caring if food was packaged in plastic (it was), or whether the tomatoes were organic (they weren’t). Somewhere my life wasn’t measured out in blood tests and supplements and scans and injections. Where I rudely
Continue readingSo this is Christmas…
…And I thought I’d give you an update. Quite a long one. It’s not very Christmassy, sorry. There are no babies in mangers. Quite the opposite, in fact. But something happened yesterday that made me want to write again, so here I am.
First the good news. We’re still together. Nearly two years after we first met, we’re still together — living together, buying property together, trying to have a child together.
I’m not going to pretend it’s all hearts and flowers. Enmeshing two lives is never straightforward. Especially when you’re not 25 any more. And to be fair, it’s not me that has taken the brunt of the upheaval. I’m still living in the same house that I’ve been living in for nearly 15 years, surrounded by my friends.
He’s the one who turned his life upside down. Continue reading
Checking in…
It’s been a while (August, last year, I can’t believe it’s been that long.)
I feel like you’re entitled to an update. (Thank you to those of you who emailed to ask how I was.) But the news is that there is no real news. At least no news about eggs, or IVF, or pregnancy. I’ve taken a break. Sorry, we’ve taken a break.
That pronoun has taken a bit of getting used to. That realisation that it’s not just me dealing with this big stuff on my own any more. Because that’s the news. The good news. He’s still here, we’re still here, and it’s great. And almost impossible to Continue reading
Oh hello…
If you’re here because you read my piece in the Daily Mail today, hello! Thanks for coming to visit. If you’re here because you’ve been following and got notified that there was a new post, welcome back.
I hope you’ve all been having lovely summers. I have. I’ve mostly been living my life as if Continue reading
Silver linings…
If we’re looking for silver linings — which let’s be honest, we are, because otherwise it’s all one great big shitty grey cloud — phoning the clinic and telling them I was bleeding made them suggest I came in for an earlier blood test. So rather than spending the weekend knowing in my heart of hearts I wasn’t pregnant but having to wait for a blood test on the Monday to confirm it, I had the blood test on the Friday, Continue reading
Today was a bad day…
And although I sort of thought I knew that it wasn’t going to happen this time, somehow it’s worse to get what seems like a period just six days after the transfer. I know, I know, I always said that nothing means anything and you can, it seems, still get your period and be pregnant. But this hasn’t happened before, and while obviously there’s a fraction of a sliver of me that thinks that might be a positive thing, most of me thinks that, as the clinic nurse told me, “it’s probably your body expelling the lining because it doesn’t need it.” Continue reading
Egged On 