By FertilityChick, Guest Author for ITNB

When I was younger I avoided doctor’s offices as much as possible. Basically unless it was annual physical time (and even those I tended to, ahem, “miss” – bad I know), or I was really, really, REALLY sick, I stayed as far away as possible. As a recovering needle-phob, I knew a doctor’s office was the very last place I wanted to be. In most cases the visit resulted in a blood test or an immunization. Man, if only I knew!

Sadly, my foray into the cruel world of infertility started with a lot of avoidance. We weren’t really ready at the time for a family. I was dealing with school and then the start of a career. However, in the back of my head, I had a sense something was wrong and wasn’t ready to face it. I knew multiple doctor visits were on the horizon and wasn’t ready to spend my life sitting in those cracked, vinyl chairs of the waiting room. Not to mention the influx of invasive tests (and needles!) that I knew awaited me.

The time came when my courage increased and I was ready to deal. However, that didn’t prepare me for the amount of waiting time I would endure! The grand tour of waiting rooms: visits with my family doctor, then the OB/GYN, later at the fertility clinic, the ultrasound lab, and the RE’s office. Now I even wait at the Naturopathic doctor’s office. (Yes, now I’m actually paying for someone to stick needles into me!) In fact, when doing a monitored cycle, I spend more time sitting in a waiting room than I do in my own living room!

Time in the waiting room has become a metaphor of infertility for me. It’s about waiting. Waiting to see the next doctor or technician. Waiting for the next blood test, the next ultrasound, the next round of acupuncture. Waiting, waiting, waiting. Waiting for follicles to grow big enough to trigger. Waiting for the right time to do the next IUI. And then of course the hardest wait of all: the two week wait. In essence, the wait to see if all of this waiting is finally over so that hopefully a new kind of waiting begins.

I’m still at the beginning of my infertility journey and now that I’ve decided to take the summer months off, I’m doing a different kind of waiting. Funny, there are moments that I loathe the waiting rooms; the despair, the desperation. Other times, I’m oddly comforted by others who are also playing the waiting game. The ones who smile knowingly and understand what I’m feeling.

This definitely isn’t what I signed up for. I’ve probably seen more doctors in the past year and a half than some people will see in their lifetimes. My only request is this: can we get more comfortable chairs and better magazines in these damn waiting rooms? Seriously folks, we’re basically here on a regular and first name basis!

For more articles by FertilityChick, please visit her blog What If? and follow her on Twitter @fertilitychick.

These three adjectives are a mainstay in our lives now-a-days. They could be used to describe our thoughts, emotions and feelings at many given moments.

Why are we so angry? Well, that’s obvious. We do not have a child yet. Delving deeper, because we do not have a child yet our lives are on hold going through this madness. To let something else out, we are angry, and at the same time reluctantly happy for our friends for being able to have multiple kids with little to no effort. We are mad that this process is costing us money we did not plan on spending.

This anger goes hand in hand with frustration. We are frustrated that all of our efforts have failed. All the doctors’ visits, all the medications and all the painful shots have been for nothing. It is frustrating that we are the only ones in our group of friends and family that are childless. It winds us up so tightly that other things around us such as work, chores, and meaningless tasks frustrate as well.

Of course this inevitably leads to depression. While it may or may not be clinically diagnosed or have a need for anti-depressant medication, all of this makes us feel down in the dumps. There are days we do not want to get out of bed. Each time we receive bad news about a cycle we spiral further into sadness. We can pick ourselves up and get motivated for potential next steps but sooner or later depression will hit us again.

What a vicious cycle.

If it sounds like we are dramatizing the helplessness of our situation, don’t worry, its not an act. This is real and how we really feel.

Why is it that people with children always have stories about someone they know or someone they heard about having a happy ending when it comes to the struggle with conception? While we know when they share these stories they are just trying to offer us hope, but, it inevitably just leads to more depression when one of these stories does not happen for us.

We cannot tell you how many times we have heard yarns spun about the following;

“My friend struggled to have a baby for years then decided to adopt. They found out they were getting a baby and that same weekend found out they were pregnant!”

Or.

“I heard about a couple who were told they could never have their own child; low and behold they just had their 3rd one last Christmas.”

Or.

“They just kept having miscarriage after miscarriage, they gave up. Then, finally on their 10th try, they had a lovely daughter.”

Or.

“I had a good friend of mine who was also diagnosed infertile; they could not find the problem. Turns out she just needed to relax, so she went on vacation and they got pregnant.”

While these stories are quite common, we all have probably heard variations on all of them. Which ones are true compared to which ones are urban legend is yet to be seen. We personally have not met anyone from these tales who arrived at the storybook ending.

Even though our trials read like a great tragedy and while our ending has not been completely written yet, please stop trying to write it for us.

If friends of yours know you are struggling to conceive they will, at some point, ask that question. We are going to discuss why they ask it and why it’s so wrong to ask it.

We already know that folks who have children have absolutely no clue when it comes to giving support to their infertile friends. They really don’t get it do they? When the above question is asked of us it seems like they’re saying “Well, you tried, just take the next logical step and get your family started.” Other things it appears they are saying are, “We have our own child(ren), so for you adopting will be just like that,” and “Adoption is an easy thing, so get on it.”

Sometimes you get a variation of the question in more of a presented story kind of way. For example, “A friend of mine at work just brought her adopted child into the office, he/she is beautiful.” That basically is telling us to adopt as well.

What we as infertile couples actually hear and think when we are asked that question is really this; “Too bad you’re barren, time to go a different direction, never mind that you will never have the birthing room experience nor get the nine months of planning a nursery etc…” It is this insensitivity to our emotions that we just don’t need to add to our current pile of mess. It appears they think there is a switch that you can just flip that would take us from trying to have our own biological child to an adopted one in the blink of an eye.

Maybe adoption is part of our overall plan or at least it may have been discussed as an option. However, for us to consider adoption just because someone asked us a short, simple question is outrageous. Never mind that the person asking is clueless about our current infertility woes and all the processes we’ve been going through for however many years, but they are also clueless about all the time, effort and possible disappointment that would be involved in a potential adoption. I wonder if these folks were thinking about having a home study done while they were pregnant?

The above question, which is common, is one of those sticky subjects that you just don’t ask of infertile couples. You just don’t ask it period. There are many more we will get into down the line. This one and 5 others made a top 6 list at a great website called the Infertility Warrior blog. The full list can be found here.

As we pass through the arc of life the old adage of “we are born, we grow old, etc…” is known to all. When we look at our own expected life milestones there are differences depending on the environment we grew up in. Typically some of the expected events in our lifetimes include; our first words, first day of school, first kiss/love, high school graduation, college graduation, first full-time job, first promotion, meeting our mate, getting engaged, getting married, buying your first home, having a child/children and so on as your children then repeat the milestones.

For the majority of individuals, these steps seem to flow with relative ease. However when you get stuck at one of these steps or one doesn’t happen in the timely manner that you prefer, everything else in your own life plan comes to an abrupt halt as well.

It appears to us that in our society there is a large emphasis on completing the majority of these life tasks. Included in this same emphasis is the overwhelming importance of having children and starting a family. While this is the grand wish of Infertile couples, it only adds to the burden and headache of the current situation.

Infertility treatments can go on for years. It is during these years that time seems to stop and all other milestones take a back seat. Life’s setbacks can occur at anytime to anyone, but Infertility hurts physically, emotionally and sometimes financially. We always find ourselves asking the question, “When will we reach that milestone?”