Posts Tagged ‘Fertility clinic’

I have just finished watching a programme called ” one born every minute ” a documentary following a birth unit in a hospital and showing , in quite an objective and factual way , real stories of pregnancy and birth .

I have been watching these occasionally but had obviously  an extra special interest in any of the fertility stories and this episode was one such case .

We followed a couple who had , through treatment , conceived triplets and now were spending weeks and months of their new families life in hospital as they boys had been born at 30 weeks and one especially was born with a lot of problems to overcome .

I have only just stopped crying and yelling at the TV .

What an amazing story and what another example of the huge tenacity and perserverance shown by so many people facing fertility issues .

It never ceases to amaze me the lengths people will go to in order to achieve the family they have so longed for . Right from initial desire for a child through to fighting for them post birth these are people who show such courage time and time again .

And yet they are such normal people too . Not superhuman , not robots . Just people who find themselves facing obstacles they never would have dreamed of .

I have seen couples cross the world to do egg donation , single women choosing to go through IVF on their own with little support , couples brought to the edge of what any relationship should ever have to deal with , and people facing loss in every sense possible just push on again and again until their end is reached .

whatever that end may be .

Even on  a small scale looking back at my own journey makes me wonder how on earth we managed to stay in tact ?!

I was describing to a friend just yesterday what it is like to go through IVF , the huge lows and occasional highs . What it was like to see both my children at just 12 cells suspended up on a black and white screen before being transfered into me . And even as I was telling her all this I kept thinking HOW ?!!

How did we get through it ?!!

How did I get through it ?

And the answer is both complicated and yet incredibly simple .

Complicated in that we created strategies to cope , called on everything we could think of to support us and get us though ( an A to Z would definitely be possible with acupuncture to Zinc and everything in between …! ) , prayed got counselling , journalled and threw our lives , heart and soul into pushing onwards .

And yet so simple . The desire for a family has to be one of the strongest and most fundemental pulls a person can face .

Robert Winston compares this drive to the desire to eat or sleep . It is quite simply just a very basic human desire

I wanted a family .

Even if it took me six years , five rounds of IVF and odds of 1 in 125,000 to overcome .

I wanted a family .

That was what kept me going .

And so every time I meet another person in the clinic , or watch a programme like I just have done . I am not left so much with a How . But rather a very simple and very fundemental empathy .

And ultimately the how will always be secondary to the Why .

All best wishes

Anya