Waiting

When we start our journey of infertility nobody really tells us anything about what to expect. We learn about the technical / medical side of things. We’re told not to lose hope. We trust our doctors. But no one talks to us about the level of patience involved. As in, the enormous amount of patience that’s involved. And honestly, if they did 4.5 years ago, it wouldn’t have really meant anything to me anyway. No one says, ok, you may need to prepare yourself for something that could take the next 5 years of your life or more. Here are some resources to help you deal with that. Or, here are the people who will help you through the two-week-wait. Infertility has been a huge test of my patience and oftentimes I feel like I fail that test over and over and over again. If it wasn’t for my husband keeping me level and breathing, I’d probably have let my lack of patience affect me even more.

We live in a world where things happen instantly. We’re used to getting results quickly. We expect people to return our texts and emails within minutes. And sometimes we even call someone to tell them that we emailed them about something - how ridiculous is that? And social media… enough said. You get the point. So how do we take how we behave in the real world, to how we behave in the world of “if you don’t have endless patience you may potentially have a breakdown.”

Living with infertility is a life of waiting. There are the obvious things, like waiting for a baby, children, a family. The two-week-wait is talked about a lot (that’s the wait between the embryo transfer and the pregnancy test) and it’s excruciatingly the longest 2 weeks of life. But there’s so much more. So much more. These things are felt on more of a daily basis, and it’s so hard, and yet somehow I was able to just cover up the distraction, and still do. In life, we often wait for things we believe will be fine. Like, an exam we write in university. I usually assumed that I passed, it was just a matter of by how much. Or sitting in traffic - waiting for that to end can feel like forever, but we know that eventually we will reach our destination. In this case, we don’t know what we’re waiting for, and oftentimes, we’re waiting for the negative, and convince ourselves that we’re prepared for either positive or negative results. Obviously, negative results are way worse, and we’re never really prepared for them. The wait is always long, no matter what it’s for. Each person needs to find her / his way of dealing with waiting. Sometimes for me, it’s being busy with hobbies, work, travel. And sometimes (oftentimes), nothing works, and it’s just complaining about how patient I need to be and how I can’t do it, but really have no choice.

Waiting for flowers to bloom, Ralph Bice Lake, Algonquin Park 2017
(c) Rebecca Schwartz

I’d like to give you an idea of the amount of patience that’s required. With infertility there’s waiting for:

• The clinic to open in the morning at 7am, so I would sit there from 6am to make sure I was one of the firsts so that I’d get to work on time.
• The nurse to call me in for a blood test.
• The ultrasound technician to call me in for my internal ultrasound.
• The afternoon phone call from a nurse which is received between 11:30am - 4:00pm about when I’m going back to the clinic and how much medication I’m taking until then. It’s a very hard 4+ hours if they call you late in the day.
• The follicles and lining to look good enough to trigger ovulation. This means that sometimes we have to go back daily until everything looks just right.
• The hospital in Israel to approve us for IVF. Since it's free there was a committee that had to review our file for a couple months.
• The nurses to call you in for egg retrieval surgery.
• The lab to call about how many embryos were formed.
• The lab to call about how many embryos survived to Day 3 (3 days of cell division).
• The lab to call about how many embryos survived to Day 5 for the transfer.
• The embryo transfer on a full bladder. We once waited 3 hours for our turn because the clinic was running so far behind. We also once waited for them to thaw another set of embryos because the first ones didn’t survive the thawing.
• The two-week-wait. Every feeling, twinge, emotion makes you think you're pregnant.
• A period to start.
• The scariest phone call the afternoon after doing the beta test (pregnancy blood test) to find out if we’re pregnant or not. I often take a day off of work on this day, because in the past hiding this distraction was just too hard.
• Calling my husband at the right time of day to share any news, and then not really waiting for the right time of day because I just can’t handle it and need him.
• Starting another cycle - it’s hard to get going again. How much time do we take off? How long does it take for all the nasty hormones to leave my body so that I will start at normal levels? There was a time where we did 3 or 4 cycles in a year, and now it’s been almost a year and I’ve only done 1. Will do another one in the Fall to hopefully make more embryos. And sometimes the doctors tell you how long you need to wait for. I have a friend who was instructed to take a year off. That’s a long wait to start trying to make a baby again.
• Test results - of any kind. And waiting for that test to happen.
• A surrogate.
• Women who reached out wanting to do it but are taking their time making a decision.
• The surrogacy agency to send profiles.
• Medical screening and clearance of our surrogate. This has now taken months. Since she’s out of province it’s been a little more complicated than expected. There was a test we were told she must do on a specific day of her cycle, couldn’t find it anywhere near her, she was then cleared based on other tests, and then this specific one was found in her town, so now we’re waiting to see if she can do it at any time during her cycle so that we can just move forward in the process. Otherwise we wait, another month.

The thing with waiting another month is usually not a big deal. What’s a month, really? 30 days? Maybe 31. Big deal. But 1 month + 1 month + 1 month = 5 years. All the months, days, weeks, hours, they add up. This adds to a sense of urgency that's hard to shake. This December will officially be 5 years we’ve been trying to start our family. That’s potentially 3 kids we could have had by then. And in December, we still won’t have a baby. But hopefully, we’ll be expecting one.