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.
