shaking hands with the elephant

I was looking into advice and help coping with the BIG DECISION top stop treatment last week and stumbled upon this podcast about living child-free.

While adoption is still very much an option for us, we're both pretty damn broken right now. We don't feel ready to start on another massively difficult undertaking and we have no illusions that adoption, while it may well be wonderful in the end and is very likely going to be our route to parenthood, will not be a massively difficult undertaking.

Anyway, I was mostly looking for a "how to" guide for getting through these first few days of figuring out life now that I'm not actively trying to get knocked up anymore. This podcast is way more than that, and definitely worth giving a listen.

It made me realize that prior to this I was among the many infertile people who refused to acknowledge a pretty big elephant in the room: those of us who walked away from treatment without a baby.

Those people always seemed so sad to me. Like they'd given up, weren't strong enough, or that their circumstances forced them to no longer to be able to keep fighting to conceive. I was so tempted by thought that we could stop, but also so scared by it. It felt like it was the "weak" decision.

The reality of it is, now that I've made it, walking away from treatment is one of the bravest decisions I have ever made in my life.

shit... we've gotta get your sperm out of there.

Let's break this down quick so you all can get up to speed:

• There's been high drama at my clinic. The RE was very ill and they flew a doctor in from across the country to do IVF in August.
• Our IVF failed - we did not even make it to retrieval. I only produced 4 follicles. Aforementioned doctor from across the country (DFAC?) was not there when this happened. The NP and PA both reviewed our files and concluded that we could "do better" and sacked the cycle.