Little update on various things

Someone brought her baby into work yesterday, and everyone was gathered around cooing over the two of them. It's funny - I love babies, and I'm absolutely fine visiting friends and relatives with babies, seeing their photos, cuddling their little ones and generally enjoying being with them.

I found it a lot harder being around this baby that I'm probably never going to see again, and actually avoided going over to say hello to them at all. I was the same when someone else went off on maternity leave a couple of weeks ago, and I find it difficult to talk to another colleague who has just become a father. I just so badly want it to be us.

We signed all our forms for the clinic on Monday, and this morning I'm off to have yet another screening test which is required before we start, so I'll drop the forms off at the same time.

We struggled with the HFEA embryo storage form - we had to say what we wanted done with any frozen embryos in the event of my death. The options were destruction, donation or research. In order to choose donation, you had to be registered as a donor - and I've been told I wouldn't be allowed to donate because I'm too old.

That left us with a bit of a dilemma, but I've also been told I'm very unlikely to have any embryos left over to freeze, and I'm not planning to die in the next five years, so hopefully it'll be a non-issue. We've already told the clinic that we don't want any embryos destroyed - if that means not fertilising some of my eggs in the unlikely event that I produce a whole basketful of them, then so be it.

I had a chat with one of my neighbours this week. He and his late wife suffered multiple miscarriages and the death of one baby two days before its due date. They ended up adopting a child. We had a very interesting discussion (brought up by him, but very relevant to me) about how people react to major and potentially life-changing situations.

He said until you're in a particular situation you can't really know how you're going to react. You can do all the fine moralising you like, you can be absolutely adamant that you'll do X rather than Y, but until you experience it, you have no idea whether that's what you'll actually do. It's quite an important lesson about not judging other people's actions, and I hope this whole experience will make me more charitable towards others.

And thinking of being judgemental, another thing has happened which makes me very glad that I've started this new blog and not linked in any way to my old blog. I received a couple of rather nasty and very judgemental comments on the old blog - you know, from people who claim to be following the teachings of the Catholic Church but forget that its biggest message is one of love, and that Jesus Himself said you shouldn't judge others.

Fortunately, I have comment moderation enabled on that blog and so I just haven't published them. But it does make me wonder why some people who claim to be faithful Christians have so much hate in their hearts.