Chiming in in The ugly truth about making babies

I’m an open person. I think since I’ve spent my life looking after people, performing deeply personal tasks and asking deeply personal questions, I’ve come to the realisation that I can only ask people those questions if I’m willing to share myself. And you know what, I’m fine with that.

But honestly, you don’t realise the questions people have. I wanted to be honest about the whole ivf thing with my colleagues. I spent more time there than I do at home, or at least it’s felt like that lately, my colleagues have taken my blood, they’ve encouraged me not to be a wuss and just book the HSG (yay for someone shoving a catheter through my cervix on April 5th), and there’s a very real possibility that one or more of them will be injecting me/holding my hand while I inject myself at some point in the not too distant future.

These girls are another family to me. We look after each other. Yesterday, my preggo colleague had to go for her scan, she’s having identical twins and is quite high risk, and they were worried at her last scan that one baby wasn’t growing as well. We all clock watched to make sure she left on time, we cared for her patients while she was away, we worried about what the outcome would be, and hoped it would all be well. And it was, she came back with 3D pics, both babies growing well, and I sat with my hand on her stomach feeling her little babies kick away, her two little boys who currently weigh the same as a bag of sugar, who are both behaving beautifully at the moment.

Anyway, I digress. I work with a girl who has an undiagnosed learning disability, and she has absolutely no filter. She’s a funny one, like a dog with a bone. She’s obsessed with asking deeply personal questions and doesn’t understand why it might be inappropriate. I think she asks me more because I generally just answer her. She’s long given up asking me if I’m ‘still with my boyfriend’, a question she continued to ask long after we’d been living together, and she knew his name.

Lately, she’s quizzed me about ivf and the like every time she’s seen me. Obviously most people understand that you have ivf because you can’t have a baby the standard way, and there’s no guarantee it will work. So I was a little taken aback when she asked me, if you end up with 4 babies in there, how many would you get rid of? I mean, just as if you would ask that question of someone who might be childless for life. She’s lucky it was me she asked, because I know what she’s like so I didn’t take instant offence and lose my shit altogether. To be fair, I didn’t have to take offence because quite a lot of people took offence on my behalf and fought the battle for me, a battle I wasn’t really interested in.

It does make you think so much harder about things, I feel like my brain is in overdrive all the time. So many women, and couples go through this. Another colleague, loud sue, had donor insemination about 20 something years ago with her ex husband. The first couple of attempts didn’t work and then it all came to a halt as the aids situation had just kicked off and it wasn’t something they had tested for routinely with sperm donation at that time. She says it’s fortunate and worked out for the best for her as it gave her time to consider what she was doing, and she didn’t want to be in her relationship anymore.

She said that listening to me talk about it brings it all back for her. It’s funny, loud sue can be a bit abrasive but her heart is in the right place, and she’s always been very comfortable with oversharing with me! I told her if she didn’t want me to talk about it with her then I would respect that and wouldn’t. She said it was fine, she didn’t mind at all, she was quite interested in how things have changed, and that she had actually run an infertility support group at one point.

I feel like it’s important to be honest with people, especially the people who are, whether intentionally or inadvertently, going to be my support system. Until we have our baby, or exhaust our options and accept that we won’t have a baby, this is our life. Even when nothing’s happening, even when all we’re doing is waiting for appointments, this is our life. You don’t just wait, it’s not at the back of your mind, it’s there, at the forefront, all the time.

I thought I was the bad one, but joey is just as bad. We’ll be having an innocent conversation about what to have for dinner, or something funny that’s happened in work that day, and he’ll all of a sudden just drop a question or little thing that’s been on his mind about it all into the conversation. He does it more than he did which I’m glad about actually, he’s not a big talker, but he’s doing to have to become more comfortable with it if we’re going to get through all this.

Xx