This week’s topic is for those of you who arrived here via the infertility route.
Do you feel you were left hanging by the fertility industry?
Okay, I know that’s a loaded question, so if you don’t feel like jumping in on this topic, or if it doesn’t apply to you, feel free to bring your own whine to the party this week.
When I first started my journey into infertility treatments they make you think it’s easy to just do an IUI or IVF and you’ll have a baby. I feel like my clinic gave me false hope with the oh I’m young and have great odds. Then I realized how money hungry they were. I was lucky my insurance covers unlimited IUI treatments, but when we did 3 that didn’t work we moved onto IVF. After success and loss with IVF#2 we had to save for another cycle. The clinic was like oh you can just keep doing IUI cycles since it’s covered until you have money to do another IVF cycle.
I’ve considered doing another surgery for my endometriosis, but my gyn wants to refer me to a fertility specialist. Honestly, I do not want to go back to a fertility clinic because I know they will start talking about treatments to get pregnant. I’ve accepted that IUI will not help me get pregnant. (We had 7 failed ones, after all.) And my husband and I decided not to pursue IVF. I just wish there was a way to get help as an infertile woman–no ob-gyn sitting with all the pregnant women and no fertility clinics sitting with all the women hoping to become pregnant…
My gynecologist is no longer working as an obstetrician. There are pics of him with the babies he delivered in one or two of the examination rooms, but I never encounter pregnant women in the lobby. It is wonderful. At my former gyn/ob’s office, the pregnant women bothered me less than the nurses and all of their conversations, sometimes judgements about pregnancies in older women, etc. I hope you can find a similar doctor’s office.
Thank you! The only upside to my current doctor is that she had to go through fertility to get pregnant, so at least her nurses don’t constantly ask me about getting pregnant. They read my chart!
Ok Rant Alert – hold on… here I go….
YES! My first fertility dr actually said to me “I will never tell a women she cannot have a baby… you just have to work really hard!” – well, well, well, here I am – I worked hard and I can’t have a baby. And then where were the “helpful” comments – nowhere to be found! This needs to change. I honestly think if you do not have children walking into a fertility clinic they need to make you sign a voucher before any treatment saying that if it fails you will go to counseling. I NEEDED counseling when it failed (7 rounds) and I had to seek out my own counseling. I was not suicidal, but I did not want to live without my baby and it was difficult to handle the emotions that came with each miscarriage. I think once I can speak about being childless without crying I would like to address this problem because it indeed is a problem. I also think that having children already and going through IVF is a different experience – not sure if they would need the extreme counseling that I needed because they do not come out of the experience “childless” like my husband and I did.
I have no idea how I would even start to address this problem, but I have thought of it many times and feel as if I need to do something about it. – So maybe that is my plan B.
Thanks for listening!!! Xoxo
I so agree with you!! After finally getting my hopes up with a pregnancy (through IVF) and then loosing my baby after 11 days (he was a 26W premie) I was devasted; and needles to say was not ready to hear “you can try again in 6 to 12 months”. I definitely needed and went to counseling as well as my husband. It was terrible, and some days it still is hard to breathe when I remember him (my baby). So yes, I feel more needs to be done, but for our (emotianal) protectin. Fertility clinics make it seem far to easy to what you actually go through.
In my country the law on fertilty treatements even states that doctors have to teach you about the psychological impact of the treatements and recommend counselling.
None of the 3 doctors who were involved in my IUI ever did. When my relationship failed due to childlessness, I had to look for counselling myself. The first counsellor was helpful in helping me throuth the crisis after separation but didn’t understand the least bit about infertility. She fell ill herself and disappeard from one day to the other. The next 6 (!) counsellors I saw didn’t understand the least bit about my emotions. I have been diagnosed depressed, unable to form relationships, traumatized, and aggressive. There is simply no professional who understands.
great, my huge paragraph did not post AGain!
I’m sorry! I thought my comment hadn’t posted this morning either. But then, I came back a few hours later and there it was. Maybe yours will show up at some point today…. It’s frustrating, I know!
Hi Ladies,
So, here’s the thing with comments. I aim to keep this site protected so it’s a safe place to talk openly. If you’re a new reader, we have to approve your comment before it posts. We all know there are people out there who troll sites looking to be hateful. No room for those people here. We also don’t want people springing commercials for baby products, adoption agencies, and witch doctors. We pluck comments like that out of the spam folder every single day, all with all sorts of other unpleasant things.
The downside to all this security is that sometimes perfectly innocent comments get caught up in the filters. That’s what happened to you today. Kathleen and I go in several times a day to free up legit comments, but sometimes our other work dictates that we can’t get in as frequently as we’d like. Please bear with us when comments don’t post right away. I know it can be frustrating, but I still maintain it’s worth it to keep the site safe.
Thanks,
Lisa
Thanks for the explanation, Lisa! And yes, it is super important to make sure only legit comments get posted. 🙂 You are awesome!
Thank you Lisa! I so appreciate all your efforts and I am especially thankful for this website. I have been a loyal LWB user ever since last year. I enjoy every minute of it and I know technology can have a mind of its own. It has happened to me a couple of times in the past where my comment didn’t show up till later so i definitely understand .. i think it only happened once where my comment didnt show up at all (2 entries down) but i will try re-writing under the “keepsake” blog post .. thanks!
Irene, please see the comment I left for Brandi. I’m sorry for the frustration. If you post a comment and it gets stuck, we will find it and free it, I promise.
Lisa
Thank you Lisa, I so appreciate all your efforts and I am especially thankful that you created this website .. I know technology can have a mind of its own! I’ve been a loyal LWB user since last year and i have enjoy every minute of it .. i figured my post got stuck, it happened to me a couple of times so i definitely understand .. i do see my post has been added now thank you for your help!
I agree with Jenn, my clinic was SO money hungry that i could see right through them. I was treated like a lab rat and a cash cow $$$ ..
Where do I even begin .. so much emotion from my experience. Here’s the long boring story, feel free to skip my comment but it feels better if i write it all out! I was first referred to the fertility clinic by my ob/gyn who had been working with me for about 1-2 years after i went through 3 failed cycles of clomid, an HSG to check my tubes and testing .. when i got to the fertility clinic, of course they wanted to do more testing (which is fine) and they wanted to repeat the same testing (for no reason because i just checked my tubes!) they also pushed me to go for genetic testing even though it wasnt mandatory and my naive self back than was willing to do anything to find out WHY im infertile .. so there i get my genetic testing blood work at some fancy place only to get hit with a $14k bill because my insurance didn’t cover part of it for JUST bloodwork LOL! of course my rep and i appealed it and a month later they gave me a break to pay up $400
anyway that was done .. then the doc said he recommended i do 3 iui’s at least and if that doesn’t work, we go on to IVF.. by the time i started my first cycle of iui they said my system “over responded” and they had to cancel that cycle and told me NOT to proceed trying to have a baby for that month .. it was the biggest waste of time and money .. i agreed to continue getting an iui the next month .. and when i did the process wasnt bad and of course because i was young they promised me a baby guaranteed *sigh* .. when the results came back .. the preg test was negative despite “great numbers to have a successful iui” at that point i was completely stumped .. how i would i endure future disappointments if i proceed .. i just couldn’t handle it mentally, emotionally, financially .. and i could see the clinic using me for data .. i took a break for 3 months .. and my restless heart called them back to see if i should just try 1 more iui .. when i did call back they pushed for IVF and gave me the run around long story short, we were not ready for ivf and not sur eif we will ever be .. i said no thank you and i’ve decided to end my journey with fertility treatments .. they left me hanging because my unexplained infertility is unexplained .. i left them hanging because i dared to say no to proceed with treatments and i didnt tell them why .. i just wasn’t comfortable. I am now holistically trying to heal for it all. Not going to force my body to do something it just does NOT want .. sigh*
Hi Irene. I have a similar story to yours. My family doctor and the fertility specialist both started with the assumption that I would do ‘anything it takes’ without caring about what it would do to my body and mind. I was never told about side effects unless I asked, success/failure rates unless I asked. In Australia there are government subsidies for fertility treatments, so I didn’t feel like it was a money making exercise, but that I was just a guinea pig with what felt like endless blood tests, appointments, scans, shots, treatments. After a few failed attempts I just stopped because I couldn’t do it anymore. Sometimes I feel guilty that I didn’t try hard enough, but my body just wasn’t able to get pregnant.
Thank you Kelly & Misty .. Kudos to both of you for following your gut and you well being is more important than anyone else trying to convince us otherwise.
It can be so hard to navigate all the decisions and the emotional rollercoasters. Good on you for following your instincts.
Thank you Kelly & Misty .. Kudos to both of you for following your gut and you well being is more important than anyone else trying to convince us otherwise.
My obgyn was a complete idiot and the room he did the implantation of my fertilized eggs was like something you’d imagine a illegal abortion would have been done. I went through two implantations, the first with 5 fertilized eggs and the second with only three. I lost them all and have a lot of guilt from that still, even though it was 17 years ago. My friend told me I will see them all someday, I sincerely hope that is true.
Since my ex husband didn’t want to have kids with me, I have never experienced IVF or other procedure in the first place.
I feel the pain you have been through, believe me. Your words go straight to my heart. I keep on praying for all of us.
i keep you and all of us in my thoughts and prayers as well, thank you
I believe there’s way too much emphasis put on how supposedly easy it is to fix what our bodies are not doing naturally. I believe it gives a lot of false hope. I believe that people don’t realize how expensive and heart wrenching it all is going through fertility treatment after fertility treatment until one is in the middle of it all.
And I believe it reinforces all kinds of negative things we already believe about ourselves and who we should as well as adds and adds to that negative list.
After a miscarriage and surgery for fibroids/cysts/endo I was scheduled for IVF. But I knew the odds and it never sat right with me. As it got closer I felt more anxious and eventually pulled out. It was probably my only real shot at having a baby. Not sure if I was, brave, weak, stupid or wise, but I do know that I followed my instinct.
My OBGYN diagnosed me with PCOS after a year of failed attempts at getting pregnant naturally. My husband was tested at our local fertility clinic and with those results we were told that IVF might be our best shot, but if they could get me ovulating then we might not have to go that route. So she put me on clomid and for six months I took increasingly larger doses and got the monthly blood tests. I only ovulated once, which was a huge blow and the side effects were really nasty for me. I know many women who have used clomid and didn’t have problems, but for whatever reason my body didn’t like it. My OBGYN suggested that we switch to metformin and another medication and try again for another three months. If that wasn’t going to make me ovulate then we would move on to more invasive procedures. I spoke with my husband about it and we agreed to take a break. My ovaries were swollen and painful and I couldn’t imagine trying to jump straight into another medication after the experience with clomid. That was almost six month ago. It has been very discouraging because everyone that I try to share this with would get hung up on our unwillingness to pursue IVF or keep taking medications. Even my OBGYN was a little confused why I wouldn’t be willing to move forward. Maybe if I hadn’t had such a bad experience with clomid I would feel differently, but I just don’t have peace about pursuing medical intervention any further at this point. It is really encouraging to come here though and see so many other women who have similar feelings.