IVF Journey: Second IVF day 37

This is my IVF diary. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for nearly four 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.

After 22 days I have now used up two bottles of this drug which I inject myself with daily, so that's good. They gave me three bottles. Hopefully that means I'm nearly there with this but as mentioned last week it is a bit uncertain. I feel quite good now though. Tired still, but more myself.

So here's something that crossed my mind the other day.

I've got my head around children now, I can be in a room with babies and toddlers and not want to cry. But I know from experience that it can be hard for people experiencing infertility to be around children.

But kids in the IVF waiting room is a particularly tough one. Because you can't escape from a waiting room. You have to wait there. And the kids are inevitably bored so their parents have to entertain them. So the kids are either running about the place, or the silence of the waiting room is broken by the parent/child interaction (singing, chatting, reading etc.) Either way, the kid becomes the focus of the whole room. And you can't get away.

I don't like it, it makes me uncomfortable. More for others now than myself, but based on my own past experience. And it feels worse in the IVF context than it would at a GP surgery or A&E, like somehow you should expect to be safe and protected from excessive infertility-related sadness at an IVF clinic. Or at least be amongst sympathetic others.

Don't get me wrong, I know that when people have kids they need to look after them. I'm not a total baby Nazi. And if they are coming to the IVF clinic - especially if their partner has to come too - they might need to bring the kid along. And there's plenty of reasons why people doing IVF might have kids. They might have secondary infertility (no success in conceiving a subsequent child). They might have had IVF to get that kid and now be doing it again to get another. It might be their partner's kid. They are probably in the same boat as the rest of us there, one way or another.

There's nothing to be done about it, but it is hard to be around kids in an enclosed and infertility-specific space.