Isolation is a feeling and an emotion that we all feel from time to time. Whether we isolate ourselves because of pain or otherwise, we become more and more lonely as our infertility progresses along its path.

In a previous article we mentioned that sometimes we become estranged from friends and family because we just don’t want to face their children-filled realities. That’s fine, we suppose, but what about those folks that actually care and want to hear from us and want to try to help and understand?

All of us here in infertile-land have (or should have) a couple of close confidants that we keep very tight inside our inner circle. These are the folks (friends and/or relatives) that know when our next round of IVF is or if we are considering adoption or surrogacy. These people know some things our families don’t and they keep it to themselves sans gossip. They are so well versed that they seem to have gone through a part of that “sensitivity training” that we wish so many others would go through. They go miles above and beyond anyone else even made an attempt to. We can label these folks as true friends who care.

What happens though when these people start to drift away too? This, to us, is a sad state of affairs. The writing on the wall starts to show when the infertile couple becomes the only one’s reaching out by phone, email or otherwise. Communication is a two-way street, for sure, but since they are a source of our comfort, we generally are blind to the fact that it slowly becomes more one-way. Even though they respond when contacted, they seem not to contact first. Is there a pattern here? Anyone else seen this?

Since these so-called wonderful people have been our only in-person emotional outlets, are they now sick or fed up with this since it has gone on so long? Has our depressive tone run them off? Did they even care in the first place? Were they just keeping us around so that they can compare their much better off “having children” situation to our failures so that they can say, “Well, at least we’re not like the so-n-so’s.”

Are our contacts going to dwindle down to none? What then?

Since the holiday season is upon us, we would like to take a brief moment to acknowledge a known sore spot with those of us who are infertile. On an almost daily basis we are sifting through a larger amount of physical (snail) mail which has been growing post-thanksgiving. Tucked into these piles of online and store catalogs are the little things that seem to send those of us sans-kids into our dark places. Yep, we’re talking about Christmas cards.

However, these just aren’t any normal Christmas cards like the one’s you might receive from an out-of-town grandparent that has a $15.00 check inside. Nope. These are the cards that come as a postcard or in an envelope that display our overly fertile friends and their grouping of kids all in their holiday best. Most of these tend to be themed, quite poorly, to show how children are growing year after year. The worst ones may even include a family update newsletter but that is a rant for another article.

Not to say that this is an entirely awful thing to want to display your family in a photograph to keep up with minimal correspondence every holiday season, but to send them out to those of us who desire to have the chance to one day create these pictures for ourselves is bad taste. After a while of infertility most friends should be aware of our feelings and understand that viewing a holiday card with them showing off their children front and center can, unfortunately, make us upset. Especially since the holiday season already brings its own set of sad emotions.

Here is our plea; DO NOT SEND US ANY OF YOUR STUPID, STAGED HOLIDAY CARDS THAT FEATURE YOUR FAMILY IN A PHOTO OF ANY KIND. We do not care to see your entire family in matching red and/or green holiday sweaters in front of a phony snowy forest backdrop. We do not care that it took you all afternoon at Sears or Kmart or JC Penney’s photo department and do not want to hear the story of how the photographer coaxed all the kids into only one good shot. Please do not make us waste paper and postage by throwing these straight in the trash or better yet using the “return-to-sender” feature of our postal system.

A lot of us infertile folks may think this in our heads, but we wanted to say it out loud…Please stop rubbing it in our faces that you have children and we do not!

By Jane, Guest Author for ITNB

F is a loaded letter. F is for Frustration. F is for F#@K, this sucks! And yes, F is for Fertility.

When my husband and I first started this process, we quickly amassed a mounting pile of paperwork from our various doctors. So I organized it and neatly tucked it away in my filing cabinet under F for Fertility. I very intentionally chose to label it “Fertility” rather than “Infertility.” You could say that I had a beef with the word “Infertility.”

Though there’s an accepted medical definition for infertility—no conception after one year of regular intercourse—that’s not my interpretation. Perhaps I could accept something milder like “Subfertility,” but to me, “Infertility” sounds like more of an absolute: No Chance for Fertility, Ever. It just sounds so negative, so final, so harsh. Especially when I was just starting the process…shouldn’t I be allowed a glimmer of hope, without being slapped with such a drastic label?

I decided to boycott “Infertility.” I refused to utter it. When I confided in a friend, I used an alternate term. “We’re fertility-challenged” or “we’re seeing a fertility doctor,” I would say. When I first called up the reproductive endocrinologist’s office and was given the choice between a gynecology appointment or an infertility appointment, I asked for a fertility appointment. In my mindset, it seemed absurd to ask for an infertility appointment. Infertility? Why would I want to sign up for that? No, thanks. I’ll take fertility, please.

As long as I am struggling to remain optimistic about the process, I would like the outside world to offer me some optimism. But when I hear the word “Infertility,” I just think about the past and what hasn’t worked so far. Personally, I try to redirect my negative thoughts as much as possible—though it’s often a challenge—to something more hopeful. Whenever I hear “Infertility,” it just drags me down.

I think my semantic choices have been based on a combination of optimism, denial, and a touch of superstition. Admitting that my husband and I were infertile meant acknowledging a possibility that we might never be able to conceive. It was hard for me to admit that then, and it’s still a difficult scenario to think about now, though only time will tell.

And though I’ve resigned myself to the term “infertility” by now, I still wince a bit whenever I use it. Semantics can be quite significant in the way that we perceive something. As long as we’re on this emotional journey, perhaps a better label would help us all feel a little better?

ITNB would like to once again thank to Jane for her article. Sometimes we would all just like to say “F-THIS!!”

By NewsGirl, Guest Author for ITNB

Infertility is a very personal battle. And this struggle…this fight…this abyss of sadness is something we tend to keep to ourselves. We don’t share it with the people who we see everyday or those who love us most. We retreat to our computers where we find amazing support on message boards and blogs from people who don’t know us and wouldn’t know us if they walked right into us on the street. But this is a huge thing that we go through. It is physically and emotionally draining. (I’m not even going near the financial implications, see The Price of Money below.) It is a lot to keep from the people you love and share your life with, isn’t it?

The majority of people decide they want to have a child and get to make love to their partner in the privacy of their bedroom. They get to surprise the world with a pregnancy whenever they see fit to share it. We don’t get that. Those of us fighting this battle get phone calls and emails asking when our next doctor’s appointment is…when the next procedure or cycle will be. Our sex lives (or lack thereof) are out there for the entire world to know. (Doesn’t it feel like that sometimes?) We can’t have a baby the “old-fashioned” way. We need doctors and embryologists and anesthesiologists just to have a chance at having a baby. We get looks of pity and pep talks. (And who needs or wants those!? Or is it just me that gets really angry from that crap?) We get poked and prodded and used as pin cushions. We don’t get to surprise anyone with the news if …IF…we actually get pregnant. And we don’t even get definitive results…we have percentages of success based on age and a whole host of other things that are beyond our control.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve skipped lot…and I mean A LOT…of family functions over the past two years because I couldn’t handle seeing kids or because I had just gotten a BFN again (see Becoming Estranged below). In a way, it feels like I’m hiding from my life. I hate that. How much of your life have you missed since finding out that you were infertile? How much of your struggles with infertility have you kept from the people you see every day or those you love? Telling our loved ones may make this fight easier to bear but telling them comes with questions…the ones about when you decided to have kids… what have you done so far…are any of us ready to answer those questions? Do we even have to?

I mentioned all this to a good friend of mine who is also struggling with infertility. And in all her infinite wisdom she said to me: “If they ask questions, you can say with impunity, ‘This is a really difficult process for us, and we’d prefer not to talk about it. I hope you can respect our wishes.’ And who knows, maybe having the visible support of your extended family will help us cope? Maybe in keeping it private, we’re giving ourselves a heavier burden to bear?”

And you know what? She is 100% absolutely positively right. How many of us suffer in silence daily only to cry to our computer screens because the people we talk to in cyberspace are the ONLY people who can even begin to imagine what it is that we are going through. We get by on virtual hugs instead of trusting those who can actually hug us. We go through the motions of every day life. We suffer through the intrusive and insensitive questions such as “Are you having kids?” We smile at family gatherings and hang out at the bar (there should always be a bar at family gatherings) because it’s easier then facing the kids that are running around laughing or the talk of so and so’s pregnancy.

But the question remains…are we making this harder on ourselves then it needs to be? Maybe we should have a little more faith in those we love? Maybe we should come out of the infertility closet?

For more articles by NewsGirl including the original of this article, please visit her blog I’ve Got News For You and follow her on Twitter @GotNewsForYou .

While traveling down the different paths of our infertility journeys we encounter many people who offer advice. The majority of these suggestions come from our close friends and family because they are aware of what we are going through since we made the decision to let them in on our little infertile skeleton in the closet. For those who we choose to tell, there will always be a major disconnect between what they think is going on and what is actually going on.

Looking beyond the comments that are off-the-cuff (see the article Why don’t you just adopt? posted below), lets delve further into some conversational pieces that arise now and then. Two specific examples that we have encountered illustrate our point.

First, we have a couple of close friends (have drifted as of late though) that went through infertility problems and tried IVF. Both were successful on their first try. Originally this gave us hope because they did the treatment prior to us starting our journey. At first, they were very sympathetic, understanding and full of useful information in regards to process. Now that we have gone through the medical ringer a few failed times, the relationship and conversations have changed. A snippet of the last in-person contact we had went like this;

Successful IVF Couple: “So how are you guys doing / handling everything?”
Us: “We’re trying to get by you know…(distant)”
Successful IVF Couple: “We totally know how you feel.”
Us: “Did your treatments end up with you having children (sarcastic)?”
Successful IVF Couple: “Yes, but…”
Us: “Then you don’t know how we feel because you’re not in our situation, it worked for you. You got your children (upset).”

While they might understand the medical process aspect of what we’ve gone through and what we are still going through, at this point they have passed us by in emotional feelings going from bad to good. We are stuck with bad.

Our friends and family might have the best intentions and only a small few might inquire as to our feelings just to be nice. Reality is that since they’ll never understand, why should they bother to take time to hear us out completely? On a more negative note, do they really care at all?

Second example; we have some relatives that have actually said, “We cannot pretend to understand what you’re going through.” That is true enough. We have tried to explain to folks that want to listen how we are feeling emotionally over and over again. Lately it’s not worth the pain. Every time we have to talk about it, it just takes us down another step on the depression ladder. If they wanted to really understand more, they would do their own research online or in books as infertility battles are very well documented. Maybe since it does not affect them directly, the motivation is not there. Maybe it is a time issue.

And why wouldn’t they have the time to research our feelings and issues? Oh yeah, they’re busy with their kids.

Avoidance. It is something that we infertile couples tend to do when situations arise that will be emotionally difficult to handle. Strong examples of this would be to decline any and all invitations to baby showers, children’s 1st birthdays, baptisms and the like. Turning these events down does not mean that we don’t care, but rather it brings us face-to-face with the reality of what we are missing and what we are not celebrating. The upset-o-meter tends to rise quickly if all we see are happy parents and happy children to boot.

After a while of non-attendance, we begin to lose touch with those folks that we used to be very close with pre-kids. Since our lives are going in different directions, or better yet, their lives are going in a forward direction and ours has halted, being able to relate becomes more difficult. Even if we were courageous enough to participate in these functions, conversations are difficult because we’re not sharing the same anecdotes related to children’s’ first this and children’s’ first that.

This estranged feeling is not limited to just friends with children. We happen to observe the same awkwardness within our immediate family. When a family member or relative says or does something insensitive to our infertile situation, we again crawl into our shell. These periods of non-contact can go on for months. Even when apologies and forgiveness are issued, there is still a sense of need to be walking on eggshells from all parties.

We are in charge of who we let into our lives. At this point, in the middle of all this madness, it might just be ok to keep the inner circle very small. There is the old saying that we should not run from our problems, we should face them head on. There is also something to be said about avoiding things that make us uncomfortable. Which one is more relevant?

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.

Not really a term you want to hear when being diagnosed with Infertility, nor any other medical problem for that matter. What does it mean, though, to us the praying, hopeful couple?

Well, in essence, it means that the doctor or fertility specialist does not have a specific reason or answer to your problem of non-conception. Reasons for infertility are endless and most can be discovered through the medical process with relative ease. But for those of us who end up in the “unexplained” category, it makes the journey and decision making process that much harder and most of the time, longer.

If a couple received a definitive answer to their fertility woes – it would be much easier to develop a path to success. For example, if the couple was told that one partner was incapable of reproduction, then the path to donor eggs/sperm or the path towards adoption can occur much faster.

With “unexplained” infertility, couples spend years going through the “cookie cutter” fertility process beginning with prescriptions and IUI rounds, and moving towards IVF. Because there is a lack of “scientific method” that goes into the IVF process, there is no real way to prove why an IVF cycle failed. Doctors usually try to adjust protocols and throw the kitchen sink at the next attempt because IVF is expensive or insurance may only cover a certain number of tries. You don’t know if the tweaks to the protocols actually helped or hurt your chances.

The process is exhausting mentally and physically. You are screaming for answers and your specialist is grasping for explanations and guessing between multiple potential infertility issues. This makes it extremely hard to determine next steps in your overall goal of having a baby. “Unexplained” leads to the frustration of lost time.

Welcome to our blog. Our catchy title is not meant to say that Infertility is by any means “hip”, but rather to show that it is extremely relevant and common in today’s world.

As we begin to work on our mission statement for our “about” page, we will start to describe why we created this blog. We are a happily married couple of 7+ years and have been going through the trials of Infertility treatments for the last 3+ years. We have been unsuccessful and wanted to create a platform to share emotions of our journey as well as give others a place to share their experiences.

We see this blog evolving as dual purpose. First, it will be a place to display our actual range of emotions, as we have ok days, bad days and even worse days. It was suggested that this could be therapeutic in a way. Second, there is much to be said regarding friends and relatives who do not understand the struggle that we are going through. This will be a type of “Sensitivity Training” for them. Even though our friends and family try to be supportive, they just don’t get it and tend to be non-helpful with their advice and commentary.

We don’t have a happy-ending to our story yet and are trying to find peace along the way. This blog will not highlight happy endings. Stories that end with a child can be found elsewhere. The same goes for support. It should be understood that we are rooting for all couples going through the Infertility process and wishing them much success – “baby dust” and “sticky thoughts”. However if you want to find those type of comments, there are plenty of other forums out there for that purpose. This site will just be an outlet for the real-time emotional effects of not having your own biological child and the feelings associated with failed treatments.

As we begin to post more articles and stories, the blog will start to take shape in these directions. Please bare with us and feel free to comment on anything and everything. Thanks and there will be more to come soon…..