Taking a Break or Vacation

Summer is here!!! Ok, it’s cooler and rainier than I would like, but summer signals us to slow down a little, have a beer on a patio, and maybe even take a vacation. A lot of offices even switch to summer hours so that everyone can leave early on Fridays. I’m just excited to start camping again. For those going through infertility, planning a vacation can be impossible. But it’s important to try and get away, even for a long weekend.

Once a couple starts fertility treatments, it’s as if any option for going away comes to a halt. I’ll let you in on how the thinking works. It goes like this:

“Ok, so we’re starting IVF next week, that means 2 weeks of hell, egg retrieval, hopefully an embryo transfer, and then the 2 week wait. If we are pregnant (hopefully!), that means that we wait until there’s a heartbeat at week 6, which is 5 weeks after the embryo transfer. To be on the safe side, let’s wait until the 2nd week that there’s a heartbeat. Then maybe we can find some deal to get away for a week at some point. But this is assuming that all is going well and there are no complications. So let’s book for 9 weeks from now. But wait, if we’re not pregnant, are we going to do another cycle right away? We should probably wait a month for all the hormones to leave my system, so that’s a good time to go away, and that would be like, a few weeks from now. But in case we’re pregnant, I can’t ask for time off work now to book for a few weeks from now. So let’s wait for the results of the pregnancy test and then decide. But what if I am pregnant and not feeling well during the first trimester. This means we should wait until we know that I’m feeling well. But I’ll have to let work know at the beginning of my second trimester and what if they don’t let me go away on vacation knowing that I’ll soon be taking a lot of time off. But so many people go on “baby-moons” so it should be fine.”

Fertility treatments are exhausting. Vacation helps rejuvenate and get our minds off things. It just makes it really hard to plan. Over the past 4 years we haven’t taken a lot of vacation. We would go away to visit family and then make sure that we weren’t doing a cycle around that time. Which was harder than it sounds. Since I didn’t always respond to the drugs, one of my cycles went on for a few months rather than one month as we experimented with different things. It was cutting it close one time. I remember the first time I got pregnant we tried to figure out timing for maybe going away based on the pregnancy timing, but that ended quite quickly and we were back at square one. At the beginning of treatments, for the first couple of years, we did our cycles pretty well back to back. This left very little “us” time except for on the weekends. Now that we take more breaks in between, it gives us some time to at least take a long weekend.

Taking a break in the Swiss Alps, September 2016
(c) Rebecca Schwartz

I know it’s hard when in the thick of it to take breaks. We would always think “this time it will work. This time it will work. This time it will work.” My advice - take a break!!! It would always feel like a month off from treatments would set us back in our planning. But it doesn’t. And it’s good for the soul. And the relationship.

A few years ago when we were living in Israel, and doing treatments there, we decided to take a few weeks to visit my family in Toronto. We made the conscious decision to take a bit of a break before starting up again. Honestly, we should have taken a longer break. After all that we had been through up to that point we knew we needed some time away just the 2 of us. So we went on a road trip from Toronto to New York, stopping in Lake Placid along the way and climbing Algonquin Peak which was ridiculously high. It was fall, and the leaves were beautiful, and we got to also stay with our good friend in New York. We had a blast. It gave us a lot of time to reflect on the situation, think about the future, and just enjoy life with each other again.

When all the focus is on treatments it’s really hard to separate ourselves from it. But if a cycle unfortunately failed, try not to dive right back into it. Take a couple months off, focus on some other things that are important in life, do some volunteering, and figure out how to get away. Experiencing a new place can help more than you think.