If you’ve been following along with my journey for a while, you know that in this most recent chapter of growing our family we did two additional IVF cycles, experienced three losses and went through four transfers (the most recent of which stuck!) So here’s some exciting news… If you’re reading this it means I’m officially on maternity leave with our rainbow IVF baby! And even though over the next few months I’ll be focusing on nurturing myself, my family and this new baby - I want you to continue to feel so loved and supported as a member of the thrIVF fam as this community means the world to me and getting to walk alongside you in your infertility journeys is truly one of the greatest honors ❤️ So here’s what you can expect from this corner of the internet over the next couple of months…

My husband, Ory, was in medical school when we started going through our infertility journey. We were accruing debt by the minute and my 50k higher ed salary wasn’t quite the money tree we had been searching for. We invested all this time and money into this process - the tests, the appointments, but it never once crossed my mind to invest in myself. And if you had suggested this to me at the time, I would have given you all these excuses…

Let me start with a full blown confession. I am a terrible baker. In fact, the last time I tried to make some cookies that weren’t break and bake, I got the portions all wrong so much so that I had to throw out my batter and start all over again when the sand like consistency refused to become anything that remotely resembled a cookie… It was rough. I could have given up right there, but I didn’t.

If you've been on your fertility journey for any length of time, you’ve learned how to talk in acronyms. Your new magic power is transforming phrases and procedures into an alphabet soup - AMH, CD, FSH, HSG, RE, TTC, and TWW. This secret-sounding fertility code is fine and dandy until a few more letters find their way into the conversation. One particular acronym is one that few couples want to hear…one that’s much more intimidating than letters abbreviating lab values and cycle days. IVF.

As a total planner, I went into type A mode once I found out that IVF was going to be part of our infertility journey. I started googling all the things in hopes of consuming as much information as possible. The more information the better you feel right? Sort of. The various processes and protocols and even the personal stories were fascinating, but there didn’t seem to be a whole lot of information out there about how I could actually prepare for my upcoming IVF cycle.

When you’re struggling with infertility one day you can feel fine and the next you’re hit with a pile of emotions with seemingly no idea where they came from. This roller coaster of emotions can make managing life hard and can make you feel unhinged. But rest assured that as hard as it is, this roller coaster of emotions is a very normal part of the infertility journey. Even though struggling with infertility can make you feel a range of emotions (that often feels like a roller coaster you didn’t ask to be on), it’s also important to know that there’s a lot that you can do to help manage the roller coaster of emotions.

For the last few months, I’ve been waiting for my gut to kick in, to tell me it was time, to feel that tugging again on my heart. I always pictured having multiple kids, but Mila has filled our life with so much joy that I haven’t felt the strong pull that I felt before. And even though that strong pull might not be there yet, if there’s anything I learned from my first go at this whole infertility thing it’s this…

I was blessed with a lot of things on our infertility journey - an amazing clinic and team of doctors, a supportive family, and a small but mighty online community of other women going through this journey. Yet, there were still so many times on this journey that I felt so alone.

When our doctor finally told us it was time to move onto IVF, there was a part of me that was actually quite excited. It was the first time in our journey that I finally felt like we were doing something that could work. Hope was alive again. But with that excitement and hope also came a lot of anxiety. What would our protocol look like? How would the shots feel? What if it didn’t work? I learned a few things from both my own IVF journey (and after the fact) that might help as you prepare for your first IVF cycle. Read on for all the reflection learnings and wisdom nuggets.

When I think back on the early days of infertility journey, it’s hard to remember what I was doing with my life. Part of that is because what ultimately happened is that I let my infertility journey consume me. It took over every aspect of my life. From the moment I woke up to the moment I went to bed I was thinking about our infertility journey.

My husband, Ory had a feeling something was wrong. I remember him bringing it up one evening before we were going to bed. “I don’t think things are working like they’re supposed to,” he said. I didn’t want to believe something could be wrong. We hadn’t even been trying all that long, so I brushed it off. Apparently he knows me super well (aka that I would stay in denial for quite some time), so he took matters into his own hands, bought an over the counter test kit from the pharmacy and sure enough discovered that we might have a problem after all.