A male perspective on IVF treatment
Ben talks about the effects of IVF and coping strategies.
Dinah and Ben's IVF treatment lasted four years until Dinah finally gave birth to their daughter Tallulah in 2010. In listening to this podcast series please bear in mind that Dinah and Ben's experience is not universal, it is their story. This podcast series is not intended to replace or replicate medical advice.
A male perspective on IVF treatment
Look, it was really hard. I think from the male perspective and men will always think this way and talk this way but you know, you want to fix things and your role in the family is as the doer you know, you kind of get things done and it’s your family’s wellbeing and welfare that’s at the heart of you know your kind of purpose and this wasn’t – I haven’t talked about this for a while. I guess it’s just something that you couldn’t fix you know and all you can do is support and even then I suppose you find the things you can fix. You know, trying to make Dinah feel better about certain things. There were crap things and it wasn’t really…
I think Ben’s nature is to be a very positive person and that’s definitely the role he plays in our relationship and my nature is to see not the negative but to sort of come from a more pessimistic viewpoint to start with and then be surprised and be excited whereas Ben – and I think Ben sort of struggled to find the positive in what we were going through and so we did implement – like I said before, we did implement strategies to try and manage that emotion and that anxiety and one of them, I remember the first couple of cycles I went through, during the two week wait I said to Ben you know, “let’s do something every night”. Let’s give each other a surprise or a lolly or you know, go for a walk and do something unusual that we don’t usually do to make sure that there is something to look forward to every night when we come home. That lasted one cycle maybe or two cycles but you know we often talked about implementing strategies to make ourselves feel more positive and more exciting and have things to look forward to. So we went overseas during the whole process. I think about three years in we decided to do a trip to Vietnam together and you know that was just something so positive in our lives to look forward to that we wouldn’t be able to do if we had a child or we wouldn’t have chosen to do if we had a child or were pregnant. I mean it’s little compensation but at least it’s somet