IVF Journey: Betweens IVFs day 8

This is my IVF diary. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for three and a half years now, and have a diagnosis of 'unexplained infertility'. We have finally reached the top of the waiting list for IVF - a form of assisted conception. I'm blogging about what happens as it happens, as a kind of therapy for me and as an awareness raising exercise of what IVF is all about.

I feel pretty rough with a cough at the moment. I don't know whether it is one of those things where you let your defences down and the germs get in - you know, like the first day of the Christmas holidays?

The husband eventually got through to the IVF clinic yesterday and they were very helpful and answered his questions. They also offered him the chance to have an appointment with a consultant to discuss things, and the opportunity to attend a 'thaw clinic' to discuss the frozen embryos. I'm annoyed I wasn't told all this and offered this support when I called in for my negative result. The husband says it is because I didn't cry / have a nervous breakdown over the phone. Other than that they didn't really tell him anything I didn't know already.

I feel very disconcerted by all this stuff at the moment. I think I've narrowed it down to the issue of closure.

The husband and I entered into this IVF process hoping to closure on a huge, painful, prolonged and seemingly endless period of infertility. We hoped that the closure would be having a baby, but it might have been that we couldn't have a baby. Either way, we'd move on and be able to get on with our lives.

When I was going through IVF and when I was preparing myself for the pregnancy test last week I was being realistic and telling myself it would be about 50/50 whether I would be pregnant. And I wasn't. And I was prepared for that, I wasn't devastated that I wasn't pregnant. But somehow I hadn't quite prepared myself for the fact that I was virtually back to square one and that I was no closer to closure. It has all spun out in front of me again with no end in sight.

Linked to this, we have 7 frozen blastocysts. Which is genuinely fantastic. This means we could potentially have eight goes at IVF in our first round of NHS funded treatment (depending how many survive the thaw, but it should be most), then I guess we could reasonably expect a similar success rate if we did it again and that would also be NHS funded. Then we could start paying...

But how long would that take? Years. Three or four more years? More? Add it to the pre-IVF infertility and it could be up to a decade of infertility permeating our every waking thought. That's too much!

But given so far the process has been very productive as well as physically and emotionally tolerable, and that I can fit it around my work, and that I am still pretty young... well what is going to prompt us to stop?

It has suddenly hit us that we might get to the point where we have to say 'enough is enough' before we have used up our free allocation, or even whilst we still have some blastocysts on ice. And if we do that, will we actually believe that we have given IVF our best shot or will we always wonder if we should have had one more go and whether the next one would have turned out to be our baby?

Psychologically I've written this year off and I sincerely hope we are just playing against the odds here - that we've been unlucky with this one and that go two or three will work out.