IVF is not difficult… it is just stressful.

We just had a meeting with one of the fertility nurses from QFG and the first things she said to us was that:

 “IVF is not difficult… it is just stressful”

After that, she used pictures, powerpoint slides, graphs, statistics, brochures and dvd’s to demonstrations and explain all the ‘simple’ complexities of what we are about to get in to. I kept thinking to myself (as she was demonstrating the act of stabbing yourself in the stomach with a sharp needle, twice a day)… yeah, I can do this. It’s not difficult.

Sure. The plan is easy to follow. You have checklist of things to do each day. You have support networks everywhere. Your doctor and your nurse (and the psychologists, and scientists and acupuncturists) will all take good care of you. The payment process is simple (uh ha.. yes, but really expensive). It should be a piece of cake!

IVF Proceedure and Diagrams

So what could be so stressful?

After the nurse wrote down a list of psychologist names and phone numbers, I asked her why she thought that we might need to speak with professional councillor. She then proceeded to tell us stories about some of her clients and the experiences that they had to deal with. At that point I realised that all of the procedural, scientific, medical things that we need to do during the IVF cycle is actually pretty easy. The stressful part is all the difficult decisions that you have to make along the way.

My husband and I are pretty good at talking things out. If we have a decision to make then we discuss the pros and cons to each available option and then figure out what is the best way forward. Just getting to this point – the nurses office – we had to make a lot of difficult decisions and figure out our point of view on certain topics. I wrote a small list of some of the decisions that we had to make so far. As you read this list, it probably won’t seem like it is a very difficult list of problems, but trust me each one had to be carefully discussed in detail before we could move forward.

Baby Creation Dish

Needles

Progesterone

Here is our (very early days) of decisions to make:

• Do we continue to try to fall pregnant naturally?
• Do I go on the pill?
• What views does our Church have about IVF, and do we agree with this?
• What will we do with frozen eggs, if we don’t need them anymore?
• Which doctor should we choose?
• Is our doctor good enough or should we try someone else?
• Should we try a different company – QFG vs The Fertility Centre vs Other More Affordable Options?
• General anaesthetic procedure or just a local anaesthetic?
• Now or later?

Whilst we have a pretty clear plan. I have no doubt that we will be faced with more stressful decisions in the future. There is certainly a lot to think about and there is a lot to learn. I feel really comfortable with our nurse. She explains things really well. She was honest (brutally) and she knew how to answer all our questions. She also gave use her direct phone number so that we could ask her more questions if we had any.

One of the question she asked us was – how did you hear about QFG? My answer was… I saw an advertisement on the back of a toilet door. Funny how things happen. And so, the baby challenge continues.

Link to QFG Nursing Team Video

Want to read more about our baby challenge? Start here…