Other ways to make a baby

  • The Beginning

    The other day we were sorting through our paperwork to move it into a new filing cabinet. In amongst the bills and insurance documents we found a letter from our first ever IVF appointment. It was dated July 2021. Four years later and we finally had our first embryo implanted. It’s not a speedy process.…

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  • Attempt Two

    It’s been a long long time since our last round of IVF, way back in August. After an extended period of silence, I was contacted before Christmas to start booking in our pre-IVF appointments. With the last round having been a flop, the consultant was keen to talk through the results with us. I was…

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  • Don’t Count Your Eggs…

    Well it’s true that pride comes before a fall. Having 15 eggs harvested we felt fairly confident that that was that with the hospital visits, apart from those needed for reimplantation. The eggs have to go through various stages, and we knew we would lose a few at each stage, but with 15 we felt…

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  • Hormonal?

    There is clearly an NHS policy around IVF, that states not to overwhelm the patient with too much information. This means my questions of ‘and what happens after that’ are met with ‘you don’t need to know that yet’. As an autistic woman this is really unpleasant for me. In part because I naturally need…

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  • Farce

    I’m a fairly impatient person, mostly because I would prefer to keep moving forward, even if it’s in the wrong direction. However, having grown up with Fawlty Towers, Black Adder and the Two Ronnies, I do enjoy a good farce, which has turned out to be lucky really. My last post was in May, the…

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  • Testing, testing

    Well, after our inital tortoise-like pace, our meeting with the consultant had felt like a new beginning, like things would suddenly shoot forwards… Sadly that wasn’t the case. Having been told that he would send out a letter to ourselves and our GP surgery, instructing them to begin our fertility tests, we heard nothing further.…

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  • Greetings and meetings

    When a couple in a film decide to start IVF, the next scene generally shows the awkward moments during testing, the woman with her legs in stirrups, or the man heading into a nurse’s office with a small cup. In reality, things are much much slower. We first broached the subject of IVF with Chris’s…

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