Insanity vs Perseverance
After our most recent negative result, I reacted very badly. Way worse than I thought I would. I won't get into the details, but it was not pretty.
I went for a walk with a friend the next morning and I said to her 'You know what they say about insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results?' She came right back with: 'That's the definition of perseverance.'
This is where this blog isn't going to be like other in/fertility blogs I've found. They are mostly about the lengths they've gone to/are going to to have a child. In these arenas, the underlying subtext is 'keep going! Stop at nothing to achieve your dream!' Actually, it isn't subtext - it's right out there. It's just the text.
By chance one day I found a blog run by a woman who had been down the infertility rabbit hole and came up empty. By that I mean, she decided to stop 'trying' before she had a child. She decided to accept her life as a person without children. Her website is dedicated to other women in the same boat: those who have decided, for whatever reason, that 'trying' wasn't helping them any more, and they've stopped.
We have been on this road for over 3 years. We have had 4 failed embryo transfers (1 fresh, 3 frozen, for those of you who are familiar with how IVF etc works). So, depending on how you count, that is nearly 40 negatives in a row. The emotional cost of these negatives is hard to quantify, but I will say that it is significant. It lies not far under the surface of my happiness; a deep deep sadness pit that I fall into approximately every 28 days. Sometimes I can bounce back out again, or even catch myself before I fall in, but other times I plunge to what feels like the bottom and finding the light is not easy.
So the question becomes: how long do we stay on this road? This meandering path with no clear end and a LOT of potholes?
Where is the balance between perseverance and insanity?
I went for a walk with a friend the next morning and I said to her 'You know what they say about insanity, right? Doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results?' She came right back with: 'That's the definition of perseverance.'
This is where this blog isn't going to be like other in/fertility blogs I've found. They are mostly about the lengths they've gone to/are going to to have a child. In these arenas, the underlying subtext is 'keep going! Stop at nothing to achieve your dream!' Actually, it isn't subtext - it's right out there. It's just the text.
By chance one day I found a blog run by a woman who had been down the infertility rabbit hole and came up empty. By that I mean, she decided to stop 'trying' before she had a child. She decided to accept her life as a person without children. Her website is dedicated to other women in the same boat: those who have decided, for whatever reason, that 'trying' wasn't helping them any more, and they've stopped.
We have been on this road for over 3 years. We have had 4 failed embryo transfers (1 fresh, 3 frozen, for those of you who are familiar with how IVF etc works). So, depending on how you count, that is nearly 40 negatives in a row. The emotional cost of these negatives is hard to quantify, but I will say that it is significant. It lies not far under the surface of my happiness; a deep deep sadness pit that I fall into approximately every 28 days. Sometimes I can bounce back out again, or even catch myself before I fall in, but other times I plunge to what feels like the bottom and finding the light is not easy.
So the question becomes: how long do we stay on this road? This meandering path with no clear end and a LOT of potholes?
Where is the balance between perseverance and insanity?
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