On hold

One of the worst things about infertility is the feeling like your life is on hold. It’s hard to make plans for the future when you don’t know how treatments are going to go, how many rounds you’ll need to do, how much it’s all going to cost you, and if you’re actually going to get a baby at the end of all this.

We’ve already had to make the IVF or job decision, which was incredibly difficult. It felt like an impossible choice – do I turn down my dream job and go for IVF when there is no guarantee I’ll have a baby at the end AND no guarantee that I’ll be able to get another great job offer? Do I accept the job and have to go through another year of heartbreak while waiting for IVF? Watching all of my family and friends have kids while I sit here with next to no chance of getting pregnant, and dealing with constant symptoms of my infertility.

As you know, I took the job and we postponed IVF. We will hopefully be able to schedule our first cycle for late spring, but now this opens a whole new set of problems. I need to travel for work but it’s hard to schedule these work trips when I don’t know when my cycle will be starting because I am so sick of waiting and don’t want to postpone it for another month. My husband’s family wants to take a vacation together but we can’t commit because we don’t know when we will be cycling, and how tight money could be. I can’t commit to going to my aunt’s wedding in late summer because I don’t know if we’ll be cycling then AND I have a lovely family member that likes to rub it in that she has a kid and I don’t, and I couldn’t handle that if we had a failed IVF cycle. We want to buy a house but are hesitant to put down so much money on a down payment when we don’t know how much IVF is going to cost us. In addition, what if we buy a house and then have something big happen like the furnace dies or we need to replace our car and then we don’t have the money to continue with IVF. We have the money for a downpayment and an IVF cycle with a couple of frozen transfers without having to drain all our savings, but what if we need a second cycle? Or a surrogate? Or donor eggs? Furthermore, what we even need in a house is going to differ if we aren’t going to have a baby. Like, right now we want 3 bedrooms on the same level and a finished basement area, but if we end up being child-free-not-by-choice, then 2 bedrooms or a master on a different floor would be fine. Heck, even something like buying a new pair of jeans is on hold because I don’t know how long I’ll be able to wear them during cycling or if I get pregnant.

Infertility has pressed the PAUSE button on my life and I really wish we could unpause.