Nobody Told Me Infertility Would Be So Boring
We were doing everything right, but nothing was happening
It didn’t seem real when the doctor said we’d have to do IVF if we ever wanted to get pregnant. IVF was the kind of thing you hear about other people doing, a sort of mysterious process where sad couples who can’t get pregnant on their own mix their fluids together in a test tube and make a baby. Not us.
I had looked at the data religiously, month after month, over the past year while we tried. It showed 38% of couples were pregnant in their first month of trying, 68% after three months, 81% after six months, and by a year 92% of couples trying to get pregnant had achieved it. Every month it didn’t happen, I watched us get pushed further and further into that little 8%. It seemed impossible that we were in that group. If someone said you had an 8% chance of contracting a flesh-eating bacteria from swimming in the ocean, you probably would still at least go for a dip. That’s how small 8% is.
But there we were. We made it to a year of trying, but all the little sticks had a disappointing number of lines: only the one down the middle that tells you the test works, not the second one. That’s the good line if you want to be pregnant. The baby line. So we kept trying.
