At least he didn't knock...

So there I am, sitting in my front room listening to music and catching up on reading the latest posts on the IF blogs I follow. I'm really identifying with what some people are writing, and like them, I'm wondering if I'm ever going to be a mother.

Suddenly there's a rattling at the front door, and a piece of paper plops onto the mat. The front gate squeaks as the person who delivered the note leaves, and I heave myself out of my ever-so-comfy recliner to see what it's all about.

It's from one of my neighbours - a photocopy of a birth announcement from the local paper. He's just become a grandfather and is proudly spreading the news. His son got married about six months after we did, and I had no idea the wife was pregnant.

The news hits me in the solar plexus and I gasp for breath.

I'm not sure I could have made the right noises if he'd knocked at the door - it just took me completely by surprise.

That was yesterday evening. I'll go round and congratulate him at some stage today. It's not his fault I'm insanely jealous of his son and daughter-in-law.

A bit irritated

So, I rang the clinic yesterday morning. I explained that AF was due over the weekend and my temperature had dropped for the second day running, so I knew it was definitely on its way, and I asked if I could have an appointment for Monday.

The person who answered wasn't my favourite nurse, but the one who booked me in last month for a scan on CD3 without asking whether I was going to be free on CD2. When I went in and saw my favourite nurse, she said, "It's a shame you weren't free yesterday, because you should have started your jabs on CD2." I pointed out that CD2 hadn't been mentioned to me as an option and that I could easily have come in the day before.

Anyway, this person said I couldn't arrange an appointment before AF actually turned up, but if it showed up over the weekend I should leave a message on their answering machine and they'd ring me back on Monday.

And sure enough, here we are on Saturday morning, AF is here and Monday is going to be CD3 - AND I DON'T EVEN HAVE AN APPOINTMENT!!!!

If I miss another month because this stupid woman refused to believe that I know my own body, I'm going to be so cross.

Oh, and just so you know what a temperature dive looks like - here's my chart for this month:

Update: Well, I rang to leave a message on their answering machine and a real person answered, so I now have an appointment for Monday afternoon. It means I'll need to leave my meeting a bit early, but nobody'll mind, so I'm quietly looking forward to whatever Monday brings now. Prayers for an absent cyst and no new problems would be most welcome.

Hope is a four-letter word

I've been awake since about 4:15. Usually I wake up some time between 4 and 5, take my temperature, roll over and go back to sleep. This morning, I took my temperature and then decided I just had to see what it was (usually I just turn the digital thermometer back off and it stores the information until I wake up to record it). It had dropped for the second day running and is now below the cover line - on day 24 of what is normally a 26-day cycle.

This leaves me in a bit of a dilemma - do I ring the clinic today and make an appointment for Monday, knowing that there's a 99% certainty AF will show up over the weekend? Or do I wait and possibly screw up this cycle by not being able to get an appointment early enough?

And in the meantime, even though Fertility Friend can't make up its mind whether I even ovulated this month, and if so, when; even though if I ovulated when I think I did we completely missed it; even though this is the 19th cycle in just over 16 months (at least I have short cycles) of TTC; even though I know with DH's disastrous sperm count and my low ovarian reserve the chances of it happening naturally are almost zero - I feel disappointed. Somewhere hidden deep inside me was the hope that all the PMS symptoms I've had the last few days were a sign of something more.

So after I looked at the thermometer, I didn't get back to sleep. I lay there worrying about when I should call the clinic, whether last month's cyst would have gone, whether I'd have a new cyst this month, how many cancelled attempts they would allow me before they said they couldn't go ahead using my eggs, what I would do if they said that...

Sometimes I think it would be easier to give up and work on moving forward and defining a new set of hopes and dreams for the future.

But not yet. I'm not ready to give up on my dreams yet.

Realising it's not all about me

After yesterday's rather whingey post, I feel I need a little balance.

There are a couple of people I'm close to who are quite tiring to be around, because they assume that everything is all about them. By that I mean that they see people's motivations as being purely "he's doing that because he knows I hate it" or "she said that deliberately to hurt me". It's exhausting, because you constantly have to self-censor and think about how what you're about to say will come across and how it could be misinterpreted.

I feel lately as though I'm turning into one of those people. I take offence at random comments on strangers' blogs, advertising hoardings, television shows... My supersensitive antennae are constantly buzzing to pick up barbed comments and veiled insults.

We went to a party at the weekend for my sister's birthday, and her 2-year-old daughter was wearing a sticker she had been given in the children's liturgy in church that morning. It said, "Are you for me or against me?"

I feel like I'm wearing an invisible version of that sticker - and anyone who doesn't pronounce themselves 100% for me must be against me.

People boast about their beautiful families - it's because they want to rub my nose in what I don't have.

People make comments about selfish hedonistic lifestyles - it's because they want to criticise me for my childlessness and imply that I live only for myself and my own pleasure.

People visit my blog and don't leave comments - it's because they hate what I write. (I know this is stupid - I visit several blogs on a regular basis, and have them bookmarked in my 'Favourites' folder, but very seldom comment on many of them. I'd hate to feel that I wasn't welcome to visit just because I don't comment, and I'd hate to make anyone feel that way here either. On the other hand, I do love getting comments!)

A couple of days ago I posted a comment on Facebook that I hadn't been able to edit a photo album as I wanted to and that Facebook obviously hated me. For the rest of the day, I was unable to get into Facebook, and was convinced it was because someone in some faceless internet organisation was monitoring anyone who said anything bad about Facebook and I'd been deliberately shut out (actually, I'm still not convinced that's entirely untrue).

So for at least the next 24 hours, I'm going to try very hard not to take offence at anything anyone has unwittingly said or failed to say. If anything upsets me, I'll try to understand why the person did it, and why it has absolutely nothing to do with me and the way I'm feeling.

And I'll try to keep the feelings of offence for when people really are deliberately trying to upset me - which, let's face it, is pretty much never.

No idea

There's a blog I read which is written by a woman who has several sons. She writes well, and I enjoy reading most of what she writes - but she is unbelievably smug about the fact that she is a mother of several sons. Her profile says that her greatest achievement in life is that she has given life to all these boys. Funny, I thought it was God who gave people life, and that having children was a gift, not an achievement.

Every so often she writes a post which really gets up my nose. She makes occasional little asides about people who don't have children or who only have one or two children, and they're often quite snide. She obviously doesn't have a clue that some people aren't able to have as many children as they would like, or aren't able to have any children at all, and that this is not through any fault of their own.

Recently, she went to a church social event and won a prize for being the mother with the most children. I've said before that it's difficult for Catholics who are infertile, and that you almost don't seem to be recognised as a person in many parishes until you have children. But all I could think when I read this post was how excluding that prize was, and how painful it must have been for anyone present who hadn't been able to build the family they wanted, whatever the reason.

I'm all for celebrating big families - I have five brothers and sisters and know the joys of a big family, and I have great admiration for how my brother and sister-in-law manage with their seven children. But I do find it a great shame how so many mothers of large families (and fortunately, my sister-in-law isn't one of them) seem to look down on people with one or two children, or none.

I can guarantee that I wanted and hoped for and dreamed of having a large family at least as much as this woman did. And the fact that she got it and I didn't is not a sign that she's superior to me, or that I did something wrong, or that she's a better Catholic. (In fact, if I were a worse Catholic, perhaps I could have seven children by now - by seven different fathers.)

I know she's not doing it to hurt me - she's never met me, after all, and has no idea who I am - and if I am hurt by her attitude, I'm perfectly at liberty to stop reading her blog.

But I have spent the last 15 years, since my friends and family started to have children, trying to calculate what might be the best time to phone without disrupting nap times and bedtime routines, offering babysitting help whenever required, remembering their children's birthdays, understanding if they let me down at the last minute because of a problem with one of the children, travelling thousands of miles to maintain relationships because it was easier for me to travel on my own than for them to load their children into the car, and when I lived in London a lot of them didn't like bringing their children into the city.

In other words, I've tried to understand how their lives have changed and the challenges they face since they've had children, and have tried to be sensitive and accommodating towards them.

Is it too much to ask that people with children behave a little more sensitively towards those of us without? And is it too much to ask that we be included a bit more in social occasions? I have no idea what the other prizes were at that church social, but I'm pretty certain they wouldn't have included prizes that were specifically aimed at people who couldn't have children - and it's just another way of excluding us from the community and making us feel devalued.

I sometimes wonder (because I'm a big one for overanalysing things) whether I want children because I want children or because I want to be accepted as a fully functioning member of the human race. And although I know the answer is that I have always wanted a family, there is a large part of me that also knows if I can't have children, huge numbers of people in the world will judge me and will think me a lesser person because of that.

And yes, it does make the pain of infertility worse - because not only am I longing for the one thing I want most in the world, but I encounter people on an almost daily basis who think I'm less of a person because I don't have it.

Browsing the site statistics...

To the person in the Netherlands who found this blog by searching on "parents give children cannabis to calm them" - please don't!

And the person who found me by searching on "ultrasound 'wet myself'" - I feel your pain.

As for "it is not a coincidence that some of the best known characters" - I don't know how that search got you here, but I'd love to know what you were actually looking for. Just like the person in Vietnam who clicked on this blog three separate times in a search for "the holy man" - I'd love to know who that was.

Embarrassing TTC moments

A few months ago, I was teaching a group of students who had last seen me shortly before my wedding. During the morning tea break, one of them asked how the wedding had gone. I jumped at the chance to bore yet another person with a few of my wedding pictures, which I happened to have stored on my computer.

I had a big screen behind me on which I had been showing Powerpoint slides, and as I didn't disconnect it, everyone in the room was able to see the photos that I was showing on the big screen. The 'My Pictures' folder on my work computer contains a random selection of pictures - a few wedding photos, a few other pictures that people have e-mailed to me, and a couple of other things.

I had obviously been using my work computer one time when I was changing my avatar on the TTC internet forum I used to post on, and had saved a cartoon to my hard drive. And that's how, when I reached the last of the wedding photos and the computer just picked up the next thing in the folder to display, this picture appeared on the big screen behind me:


This is a shameless request for comments to make me laugh (and hopefully make me feel a little better about my own faux pas) - please share with me any embarrassing TTC moments you have had...

Life swapping

After a stroll into town and a nice lunch in a cafe, DH and I stood outside the cafe chatting for a couple of minutes before he gave me a kiss and walked off, looking back a couple of times to wave and blow me another kiss. After all, it was going to be a full three hours before we saw each other again.

When he'd gone, I noticed a group of teenagers standing nearby. One of them was heavily pregnant. She wore a tiny little vest top and a tiny little pair of trousers, and her naked bump stood out white and proud between them. She also wore a nasty scowl, and it appeared to be directed at me.

"Your chap not treat you as nicely as that, dear?" I thought in a nasty, gloating sort of way (because I can be pretty mean when I feel like it). "Well, maybe if you'd waited until the right man came along like I did, you too could be treated with love and tenderness, and your man would hold your hand and support you as you... errrrm... went through IVF because you were both too old and knackered to conceive naturally..."

So there we were, a little bit jealous of each other. Or maybe I'm flattering myself and she just thought it was gross to see people as old as us kissing in the street (though I promise you it was just a quick peck - nothing inappropriate!). Either way, I know that if I had what she has, I'd treasure it and thank God for it and it would make my life complete.

But I'd still rather be me than her.

Loving this birth announcement

My family have been taking a trip down memory lane this week, sharing old e-mails about first dates with people who are now our husbands and wives. I was looking at some of the e-mails that went round the family around the time I met my DH, and came across this birth announcement which my brother saw in his local paper and sent to the rest of us. I'd so love to be able to make an announcement like this...

Jen and Andrew are delighted to announce the birth of Ross, on 19 February 2007. A big (4.5kg), bouncing brother for Ian, Lauren and Emma and grateful thanks to Dr P and nursing staff at W Hospital. To all those who prayed for us when we thought we couldn't have children...please stop!

One-track mind

I need to get a birthday present for a teenage boy, so I've been doing a bit of armchair shopping here - which is how I came across this DVD:



And the first thing I thought was "what's a fertility video doing in the 'suitable for teenage boys' section?" - but then I figured out that 'follies' in this context didn't mean 'follicles', and that 'NFL' probably doesn't stand for 'National Fertility League'.

Proving how English I really am

DH and I are reading this book at the moment for our book club. It's an anthropological study of the English, and we find ourselves sometimes laughing and sometimes cringing, but almost always nodding with recognition, because it's scarily accurate about our little foibles. If you're thinking of visiting the UK for the first time, I would highly recommend that you read this first - it'll really help you to understand what makes us tick.

One of the foibles that it mentions is that the English hate talking about money. This results in an awful lot of small talk at business meetings before anyone is willing actually to get down to the dirty business of discussing nasty things like orders and contracts. And even then, the financial part of the contract will not usually be raised in the meeting itself, but will be covered in writing afterwards. This is true even in my line of work - and I'm an accountant!

The taboo is so strong that last night I had a nightmare that I'd offered to help a friend's husband with his tax return. This would, of course, have entailed him telling me how much he earned, and he reacted with great embarrassment, as though I'd just offered to strip him naked and give him a bath or something. I woke up in a cold sweat and was hugely relieved when I realised it had just been a dream and I hadn't really committed such a dreadful faux pas.

Our problem is exacerbated when we're employing someone in the home. On the part of the employer, there's a squirming embarrassment about the fact that they're paying for a service, which is also tied up with the fact that we are acutely class conscious but don't want to admit it.

The result of this is that most English people are ruled with a rod of iron by anyone they pay to come into their home to do a job. Last night a friend of mine was telling me about the chap who's retiling her bathroom. She's getting very frustrated that he won't get on with the work, but follows her from room to room with his cup of tea, chatting. It's just not 'done' to mention that she's paying him to do a job and would like him to jolly well get on and do it. In fact, when he disappeared for three hours the other day and detected a slight note of testiness in her voice when he returned, he acted all offended and said he wasn't sure if he wanted to finish the job.

DH and I both work long hours, and DH is not very domesticated, so we employ a cleaner for three hours a week. Over the last few months, she has picked and chosen when she'll come to us - sometimes the house would go 10 days without being cleaned, sometimes only three. She would always let me know when she was going to grace me with her presence (though she didn't always turn up on the promised days), and I would dutifully leave her money out on the side.

Yesterday she had decided it was convenient for her to come in the evening. That was fine - DH and I were planning to be out anyway, so she would have had the house to herself. But I was somewhat surprised to get home at 5:00 (I had a day's holiday and had been out running some errands in the afternoon) and discover that she had already been, and had left me a note saying she hadn't done the cleaning because I'd 'forgotten' to leave her the money.

I immediately phoned her and pointed out that she had said she would come at 6:00, and I would have left her the money then. She responded that she'd changed her plans, and had far too much on her mind at the moment to have bothered to let me know - and if I didn't like that, perhaps it was time I found another cleaner.

So here I am, paying this woman a very good hourly rate, maintaining the pretence that we're friends rather than employer-employee and allowing her to dictate when and how she performs the job for which I'm paying her. And now I find that I've been sacked by my cleaner for daring to suggest that she might actually let me know if she's not going to turn up at the agreed times.

Sometimes I wish English society had taught me to be a little bit more blunt and direct - but since it didn't, if you want me today I'll be cleaning the bathroom.

People who know

On Sunday morning I went for coffee with a couple of people from one of the forums I go on. It was great - they're both further on in their treatments than I am and were a mine of useful information for me. We're all being treated at the same clinic, so were able to compare notes about the staff there (chief highlights being that we all agree the consultant is a man of few but well-chosen words who really knows his stuff, and the head nurse is an absolute star).

We talked about the clinic, the staff, the injections, the treatment regimes, our hopes, fears and concerns about our treatments, how our husbands were dealing with it all... We'd never met before, but our common experience enabled us to open up to each other instantly, and before we knew it two hours had gone by.

Some people don't tell any of their friends and family IRL that they're going through fertility treatment, and while that may be right for them, I could never keep quiet about such a major thing in my life. I've had some amazing support from most of my family and friends, and couldn't have got this far without them. I've also had my fair share of well-meaning but not very well-aimed comments, and a few that I couldn't even describe as well-meaning, but the people who made the latter comments are definitely out of my life now.

But being able to talk freely to people who are going through the same thing, and who really get it - that was amazing! I already can't wait for the next time we meet up.

Acupuncture again

Wow!

I admitted only a couple of days ago to being a bit sceptical about alternative therapies, even though I'm willing to give (some of) them a try. Today I got an answer in a big way about acupuncture - I still don't know whether it's any good for fertility (and of course I have the whole issue that sticking needles into me probably won't do an awful lot for my husband's sperm count), but boy, does it have an effect!

Today I had two issues I wanted the acupuncturist to concentrate on. The first was that I was due to ovulate around now (and may already have done so at the weekend) and wanted to give the egg a bit of a helping hand to get out and try to avoid creating another cyst. The second was that I've been getting a lot of tension headaches recently, and had a huge one today that lasted most of the day.

For the ovulation, he stuck needles over both ovaries. They're tiny thin little needles, and they only go a little way in - just beneath the skin. The cyst last month was on the right ovary, indicating that I should probably be ovulating from the left one this month. He gave the needle on the right-hand side a little twitch, and nothing much happened.

Then he twitched the one on the left - and crampy shooting pains started to go from my ovary all the way across the middle and down into my bits. Apart from the fact that he said it was a good sign, I have no idea what that meant, and it's certainly never happened before - but there was definitely a major connection between where he stuck the needle and the whole of my reproductive area, and it definitely felt as though something was going on there (but not on the right side, which I didn't expect to be active this month).

For the tension headache, he stuck a couple of needles in the back of my neck. When one of them went in, I felt a tingling sensation all the way down my back and a sharp pain about halfway down, nowhere near where the needle had gone in. There was also a dragging pain when he touched the needle.

After all the needles were in, he left me to lie on the table under the heat lamp while he wrote up some notes. About five minutes in, the muscles all the way down the right-hand side of my back took on a life of their own - my torso started writhing and twitching as the muscles contracted and relaxed in waves. I called him over, and after watching for a while in fascination, he took out the needle in the back of the right-hand side of my neck. My back spasmed one last time and then relaxed, and I lay completely still again.

I still can't tell you with absolute certainty what the therapeutic benefits of this treatment have been. But I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt that the points where the needles go in have a huge significance and have a major effect on my body.

I'm still a little bit freaked out - but for the moment, I no longer have a headache, so I'm also a happy bunny tonight.

In it to win it

The strapline for the UK's National Lottery is "You've got to be in it to win it". Well, in this month's fertility lottery (and the odds of success are, of course, equally low for us - if not lower), it looks as though I'm definitely not in it - my temperature went up today, indicating that I may have ovulated a couple of days early, and there was absolutely nothing there to meet the egg.

Yesterday we went round to see DH's parents. They wanted a new television, so we picked one up on the way over there, along with a new (flat-packed) television cabinet. When we arrived, I got out the screwdriver set which I had taken with me and put the television cabinet together. I then got the television out of its box, attached the Sky box and video, set it all up and showed his parents how it worked. On the way home, we got a flat tyre (on a single-track country lane in the middle of nowhere, in the dark). I sent DH to set up our warning triangle, then he held the torch while I changed the tyre.

It's something that has come up a few times - we both lived alone for several years before we met. I have found that a woman who lives alone is expected to know how to do pretty much everything, while a man who lives alone gets looked after. Consequently, I'm fairly well able (though not always willing) to turn my hand to most things around the house, while DH doesn't really know where to start.

Last night I was left wondering if standing by while I did all those jobs yesterday made him feel a bit emasculated - especially as when we went to bed, I was feeling a bit amorous and he actually used the line, "I've got a bit of a headache - can we just lie here and have a cuddle?"

Alternative therapies

After we'd been trying to conceive for 12 cycles, I decided to have a go at something to give our attempts a little boost - so I started having acupuncture. I quite like going to my acupuncture sessions - the guy's very friendly, and he listens to me and makes reassuring noises, and the needles don't hurt or bother me at all. Obviously, once we discovered that our main problem was MFI, I realised that the most successful acupuncture ever wasn't going to get me pregnant if the needles were only going to be stuck into me, but still...

After a few sessions, he decided to try giving me herbs as well, and I took those for a couple of months. My cycle became a little screwed up, and my DH wasn't happy about it at all. He blamed the herbs and told me to stop taking them - so now I'm back to just the needles every week or two.

The thing is, I've heard from lots of people who say that after an acupuncture session they feel particularly relaxed or floaty. I can't say I feel any different at all - the herbs definitely seemed to do something, but the needles? If they do have an effect, it's a very subtle one. Except that when he uses the heat lamp and leaves me for half an hour with needles sticking into me and a gentle heat diffusing across my stomach, I do sometimes fall asleep - but then, I suffer from chronic insomnia and therefore also from chronic exhaustion, and if you get me lying down in a warm, comfortable place and leave me there, it's not surprising if I fall asleep, needles or no needles.

Last night a friend invited a group of us round to her house for a taster session with her reflexologist. Again, I'd heard great things about how relaxing reflexology is, and since things are quite stressful in my life at the moment, I'm all for a bit of relaxation. So I went along, presented my feet and let the woman play with them for 45 minutes or so, and felt... well, nothing really. It was pleasant enough, but I didn't get these warm, relaxed, sleepy feelings that other people have talked about.

On the other hand, both the acupuncturist and the reflexologist have pointed to areas of my body and said that something in them indicates a problem with a completely different area of my body, and in each case they've been right. So is there something in it? I don't know.

Similarly, I don't know about this hypnotherapy relaxation CD I've just bought. I'm willing to try it, because I really do need to destress. But I've only listened to it once so far - and the back of my mind was telling me that I didn't feel any different and it was all a load of tripe ... until I fell asleep halfway through it.

Am I too stressed to feel the effects after just one or two sessions? Or is my scepticism stopping me from entering into it fully and therefore stopping me from benefiting from it? Or is it all a load of bunkum that I'm throwing my money away on because I'm desperate?

I wish I knew...

And thinking of destressing...

One of my favourite hymns is 'Dear Lord and Father of mankind'. I've always loved it, but I've loved it even more since I heard a radio programme which mentioned that it's the only hymn which specifically refers to stress and asks God to relieve that stress for us.

In this modern, fast-moving world, we all live stressful lives. We're living in turbulent times economically - many people are concerned for their jobs, are trying to balance the fact that their outgoings are increasing while their income is at best remaining the same, and are coping with increased workloads and greater demands from their employers if they are lucky enough to have kept their jobs.

Going through treatment for infertility, we have added stresses on us. There's a heavy physical and emotional toll, a financial cost, and the ever-present fear of failure and of what that means for our plans for the future. And since the mind and the body are so closely linked, we need more than ever to relax, let go of the stress and go with the flow as much as we can.

So what could be more perfect for us than to sing this prayer:

"Drop thy still dews of quietness,
Till all our strivings cease.
Take from our souls the strain and stress,
And let our ordered lives confess
The beauty of thy peace,
The beauty of thy peace."

The next 19 days...

Not that I'm counting, but my next AF is due in about 19 days' time. I'm so grateful I have short, regular cycles.

So now I'm making plans for the next 19 days, to take my mind off the waiting and get myself as ready as possible for what comes next. Here's my list of things to do:

1. Keep going to acupuncture - ask him if there's any area he can work on that will help to reduce the cyst and ensure I don't get any new ones to replace it.

2. Take the three days' holiday that I'd booked for the putative time of EC/ET at the end of next week, and use it to (a) relax, (b) book someone to sort out the damp in the front room, (c) relax, (d) arrange for the flat roof in the kitchen to be replaced, (e) relax, (f) arrange for the windows upstairs to be replaced with double glazing, and (g) relax. If this turns out to be too much to do in three days, items (b), (d) and (f) can be put off for another time or delegated to DH. Items (a), (c), (e) and (g), on the other hand, are non-negotiable and must not be omitted.

3. Start listening to the hypnotherapy relaxation CD that arrived yesterday and work on relaxation techniques.

4. Go for a taster session on reflexology and arrange more sessions if I find it helps me relax.

5. Take the opportunity that has now presented itself to go and give blood one last time before I start pumping my body full of hormones.

6. Rearrange some of my teaching commitments and let go of some of the other stress-causing issues at work.

7. Eat healthily, go to the gym regularly and lose a bit of weight.

8. Get together with some other people I've 'met' online who are being treated at the same clinic and see if we can get a little real life support group going.

9. Pray. Actually, that should probably be higher up the list, but it's kind of an ongoing thing rather than a new one. After all, I haven't added 'breathe' to my list, and one is as natural as the other.

10. Look after DH, feed him a sperm-enriching diet and make him feel loved and cared for. Again, this should probably be higher up the list, but it's also hopefully nothing new.

Having pretty much cleared my diary for the next couple of weeks, I have a perfect opportunity to get myself calm and relaxed and to ensure that I'm as ready as possible to go through whatever I need to next month.

That Friend

You know the one - I'm sure we all have one. She and her husband had only to decide that they might like a baby, and BAM! - there she was, up the duff. She sailed through her pregnancy, and since her baby was born every Facebook status update has said things like "That Friend is very proud of her little girl today", "That Friend thinks her little girl is just too cute" and "That Friend is glad her little girl is finally asleep". Every e-mail is full of how clever and amazing the little girl has been recently, occasionally interspersed with grumbles about tantrums and sleep problems.

You made the mistake of confiding in That Friend when it first became clear that it wasn't going to be as easy as you'd hoped for you to conceive, and she immediately advised you that you were trying too hard and should just relax. "Look at us," she breezed. "We never tried at all - we thought we'd just stop the Pill and start trying the following month, but by the following month I was already pregnant."

When you'd had the tests and she was still counselling relaxation, you felt like shoving your test results straight down her smug little throat. How could she still go on about how easy it was when you had a specific medical explanation (actually, more than one) for the fact that you weren't getting pregnant? Did she also breezily advise cancer patients that they should just pull themselves together and not be such wusses, because she'd never had cancer and she was sure it was just because she had the right sort of attitude?

But although your communications with her became less frequent, you still kept in touch with her, because, blind side concerning conception apart, she still had her good points and your friendship ran deeper than the hurtful little comments. And besides, she wasn't INTENTIONALLY hurting you - she just couldn't understand, because she had never been in your position. And you always knew she wasn't the most empathetic person on earth.

Well, guess what?! I heard from That Friend yesterday. And her great long e-mail was only 50% about her little girl this time. Because the other 50% was all about the fact that she's now pregnant with Number 2. And they've only just decided to start trying!

And before you ask, yes, she does know that things are a bit more serious at our end than just a simple need to relax - after telling me all about her symptoms, how exhausted she is with this pregnancy, how it compares to her first pregnancy, and how nervous she is about her 12 week scan, she did remember to say before she signed off, "By the way, how's the IVF going?"

So you can give me a serious pat on the back today, because not only did I not pick my laptop up, jump up and down on it and throw it out of the window, but I actually responded to her e-mail with suitable congratulations.

And I think you'll agree that for that alone, I deserve for the universe to reward me with some similar news of my own some time soon...

Adding insult to injury

When I went into the clinic on Friday afternoon, there was apparently some sort of drama going on - in fact, it seemed at times like a French farce. I sat in the waiting room for about half an hour, and during that time the consultant and all three of the nurses kept running through doors on one side of the waiting room and reappearing at doors on the other side, as if by magic.

I didn't mind waiting - I'd left work early, having already done more than my contracted hours for the week, and so didn't need to rush back for anything. The French farce was mildly entertaining, and I had a book with me.

What did irritate me a bit was that there was a couple waiting in there as well for pretty much the whole time I was there, and the husband had an absolutely streaming cold and spent the full half hour coughing and spluttering. The waiting room is tiny, and it's hard to get away from someone who's ejecting little virus droplets into the atmosphere. And I couldn't help thinking that if that had been my husband, I'd have told him to stay at home - most of what they do in that clinic is done to the woman, and while it's nice to have your husband's moral support, it's even nicer to let him stay at home to nurse his Man Flu and not infect everyone else in the waiting room.

So I'm not at all surprised that I've had a nasty scratchy throat since yesterday, and I expect the full-blown cold to come out any minute now...

Talking it over

So DH and I went to see his parents yesterday, and on the way back in the car we had a good talk. As I suspected, he didn't notice that I spent most of that concert on Friday evening crying. I did try to hide it from him at the time, as it could have got very messy and public if he had noticed while we were there in the middle of a crowd, and he really wouldn't have known how to handle it. And like I said, there were no big shuddering sobs - just silent tears coursing down my cheeks and a damp patch growing on the front of my shirt - and my husband isn't the most observant person ever.

Anyway, he said he thought it hadn't affected him so badly because he doesn't know as much as I do about the whole process and so when I told him we couldn't do it this month, he just thought, "Oh well, we'll do it next month." His only concern was whether there was something wrong with me and whether this cyst was normal, so when I said the nurse wasn't worried about that, he didn't worry either.

I said it was a little bit like psyching yourself up for a very important exam, preparing yourself as well as you could, getting your nerves in check as best you could, only to turn up at the exam hall and find that the exam isn't happening for another month. I'd been dreading some of the physical stuff I was going to have to go through, hoping for success and fearing failure, and all the hopes and fears of the last few weeks had been dashed in five minutes, to leave me still hanging on and building up the same dreads, hopes and fears - along with a couple of new ones.

It made me realise that there were things that can go wrong with this process that I hadn't even thought about, and it made me think of the 90% chance of failure (at my age) rather than the 10% chance of success - and also that our cancelled cycle this time doesn't even fall within that 90% failure rate, because we failed before it even started.

I told him if we can't have children, I'm sure our life together will still be happy, but there will be a grieving process for the life we had hoped for - a readjustment of our plans for the future and of our hopes and expectations, and there will be times when we'll just feel sad that we don't have the thing we most wanted. Life without children can be good, but it's very different from life with children, and whenever we've talked about our plans for the future, they've had children in them. We'll have to go through a process of putting our dreams aside and creating new ones.

He said he didn't think it was time to think about that yet. He still has hope that we're going to succeed, and although he realises that there are going to be many difficulties and disappointments and a whole lot more tears along the way, he's definitely not ready to give up on the whole thing.

I've told him before, and I said it again last night - he's all I need. If I have nothing else but still have him, it's more than I hoped for just three years ago when I was resigned to being single and alone for the rest of my life. But he's not all I want. I want to see him being a daddy, because I've seen how my nephews and nieces and my friends' children adore him, and I know what a fantastic daddy he'll be. And I want to be a mummy - I've wanted it all my life. And as he said, what happened this week was a setback and not the end. It could still happen, and we're not giving up yet.