The benefit of hindsight

The benefit of hindsight 

I think you know, with your kind of work colleagues and things like that I tended to keep it pretty private and I guess that was a vague decision that we made at some point but I don’t know that we really discussed you know who we were going to tell exactly and who we weren’t but there was enough family who knew what was going on that that was probably enough and you know, we kept it pretty private but I don’t know if we did it again, you know, I don’t know if I would do it the same.  I probably would but that’s just the conservative in me I think but I don’t know.  As far as sort of having that, I mean Dinah was doing the counselling sort of stuff which we probably mentioned already but yeah I think a sort of typical male perspective on that of you know, well, you know you just sort of tough it out and you know it will come good in the end anyway so you know, it’s just a waiting game, we’ll get there.  I think that was a big part of my thinking.  For me the whole way through I said to Dinah “it will happen” and you know from my understanding of the science which is pretty limited let’s face it but you know, I’ll pretend I knew what I was talking about, my understanding from talking to the specialist and so forth was that it was a numbers game.  So if you kept doing it for long enough, or the longer you did it your chances of getting pregnant and staying pregnant were good.  Not necessarily good but that was the way to get there.  So giving up wasn’t – you know, I mean while tempting and would have been a road that we could have taken a hundred different times, that kind of voice in the back of my head constantly said keep trying and we’ll get there, just keep going, keep going, keep going and I think in hindsight you know if we’d know that there was a date or a time that it was going to happen, that it was going to take five years but at some point it would happen it would have been so much easier and I know that’s not going to happen for everyone, I know that you know we were lucky in the end but trusting that voice that was saying keep going, keep going, turned out to be the right thing to do.  So if we were to live it over again, I would have still said keep going, keep going, keep going but it would have been nice to know that that was true.  That would have been a lot easier.

I think it’s really hard to give advice because you can only really say from your own point of view, like what helped you or what worked for you and everybody is going to come at it differently.  I mean I know you know, a very good friend of my sisters went through IVF after I had started so I’d done a couple of cycles unsuccessfully and she started and did her first cycle and got pregnant straightaway and had a child and I found that extremely difficult to cope with because that wasn’t anywhere near my experience whereas in a way I think that is the ultimate IVF experience.  You know, you get to the point where you have to utilise IVF services, you go through IVF, you conceive straightaway and you have a child from that conception.  I mean that’s what we all want and that’s what we all – well I think, we definitely expected that that would be our story as well and for me in particular and I guess for Ben as well, when that’s not your story it becomes very difficult to manage your expectations around that so I guess my advice if there is such advice is to you know, go with your gut feeling and go and get assistance as soon as you feel that there is something wrong instead of waiting for a magical six month mark or 12 month mark or whatever of not being able to conceive and you know, just embrace the whole process because – instead of just sort of trying to fight it.  I think my whole experience I was fighting it going this is not the way it’s meant to be and this was not meant to happen for me and when I didn’t conceive first times it’s you know, I’m meant to conceive first time and that’s how it’s meant to happen and I guess if I was to go back and do it again I think much more like Ben’s sort of saying, is that you know hopefully we’ll get there in the end so just use a bit more of a Buddhist sort of attitude and just accept that this is where you are and what you are doing and this is all part of it and hopefully it will grow you a beautiful baby and it doesn't actually matter in the end where they come from because they all behave exactly the same and they all do exactly the same things and they all bring you just as much joy as if you had conceived naturally so in the end it doesn't actually matter.