I’ve not written anything personal on the blog for a while and sometimes I wonder whether it’s a bit of a strange mixture when people may be coming to look at interiors stuff but hey – we all have a life outside of work and although mine are somewhat intertwined I’ve found over the years that talking about our personal situations, especially when it comes to step children and the hard task for many of creating your own-blood children has helped a lot of people, myself included – so I think I’ll continue dropping in the personal life in fits and starts.
Since sharing our IVF journey online I’ve realised, and I can’t say this enough – there are SO many people in the same boat out there. If anyone is reading this thinking about or starting IVF or struggling with infertility just know that you are in no way alone, there are so many of us out here just being told about, starting to think about, in the midst of or washing ourselves off from (with varying degrees of success) those muddy, murky and salty tear filled waters of IVF.
We’re almost two years out of those waters now, very much the other side of our 5 try, 2 yr IVF experience and enormously, heart swelling and poppingly grateful for our little Sylvie Girl that came at the end of what was at times, probably much more than I would have admitted at the time, a pretty harrowing ordeal. But when she went in, she was one of two embryos that were viable at the time, which means we have another potential little someone sitting in a freezer, in the Care Fertility Centre in London.
It’s strange, because I suppose technically, they would be un-identical twins as they came from the same ‘batch’ 😂 God IVF forces you think about things in a weird way. And because IVF makes you think in these strange ways we have agonised beyond belief about what to do with this little frostie, far more so I think than our couple counterparts that just say ‘oooh let’s try again’ – maybe I’m wrong, but somehow having a little embryo sat there on ice waiting for you to decide what to do feels very ‘real’.
So after weighing up all the possible ‘cons’ of the situation with a fine toothed comb, including but not limited to –
- Guilt at not giving all my attention to Sylvie and many other things
- Feeling like I’m ‘pushing my luck’ and something will go wrong
- Money/space
- Going back to the clinic and ‘that head space’
- Not having a clue how I would cope with two under 3
- What If they don’t get on and fight all the time
We decided that for the sake of the pros (as there is an equal and opposite pro to almost every con…),
- It’ll be good for Sylvie to learn to share
- Feeling like I’m pushing my luck is just a silly feeling, and only a feeling
- We’ll work out money and space either way
- All of the clinic visits were worth it for the little girl we have now so one last visit isn’t much to go through
- It should actually be easier when they start to play together
- She’ll get a friend for life
to let the universe decide. Seeing as there’s only a 30% chance of this embryo working anyway due to both my age and the general percentages of IVF we’ll give it a go and see what happens. Even writing this now I’m still flip flopping back and forth about how I feel about it all. What with work hotting up I stress at the thought of taking any time out and another C-section is certainly not on the ‘want list’. But we now have a call booked in on Friday with the clinic to see about next steps and we’ll go from there.
Originally I was going to go back to the same Dr we used for Sylvie but he wanted me to have extra procedures before the transplant of which I have no interest in. I’ve been poked and prodded quite enough to last me for some time and my reasoning is that if anything should be found that may hinder the chances of a second go I won’t be going through the ‘treatment’ for it anyway – I would call it a day there and then. So – best to go in blind and just leave things up to nature – a factor that we seem to so readily disregard when we walk into a Drs clinic desperately hoping for a child.