Not for a long time. Not for a long time. And then we did tell when we would go for IUI or IVF or whatever and then we found it was too difficult to involve other people. So every time it didn’t work it was like getting the whole emotional bag of other people as well as your own to deal with. And it was like oh it didn’t work. And the whole sympathy thing. It was justwe didn’t feel like that anymore. So we totally did it secretly and didn’t tell anybody. In the end, and it was easier because we had done it before and we didn’t need the support of other people.

I have shared it with them. I think, as I said before I am quite an open person. I am quite an honest person and I think that people by now, if I hadn’t have said anything would be fearing for my sanity, and thinking what on earth is happening. So my parents have been absolutely fantastic in terms of support. They are teachers, and obviously have surrounded themselves with children all their lives and it is a natural longing for them to be grandparents. And financially they have even like offered and helped and I can’t say I want for better parents.

Friends, I have obviously told them what has happened. At first I kind of sang it from the rooftops, thinking that I was going to get a successful outcome. And that didn’t happen and now I am at the stage of thinking, well the fewer people I tell, then the fewer people I have to ring up again and tell them it hasn’t worked, so I just think well it is actually better to keep it quieter now as time goes on. So, and it is more of a private grief between myself and my husband.

But the problem is that IVF is so complicated, unless you actually have been through a cycle or know someone who’s been through it, most of the time the information that you’re feeding to your friends and family, they have no idea what you’re talking about. I remember the first time I came back from the clinic on my first cycle, and I’d had my scan during my stimming injections, and I had thirteen follicles. And I texted all my friends to tell them I had thirteen follicles. One of my friends, who had been through three cycles of IVF herself, texted me back and said, That’s brilliant All the others texted me back and said, What is a follicle And I think that really brought it home to me that actually there wasn’t really a lot of point in involving them in every stage, because they really had no idea what I was talking about. And I think one texted back and said, Is that good or bad Because she’s got no, no sort of frame of reference. I mean if everyone else is getting three hundred follicles, then clearly thirteen is rubbish. But she had absolutely no frame of reference at all to understand what I was talking about. And I think at that stage I realised that actually it probably wasn’t really worth telling everybody. And I mean that was the brilliant thing about the Infertility Network, because of course I had a whole bunch of friends online who I could go and post in the chat room and say, I’ve had thirteen follicles And they’d all come back and go, That’s grea because they all knew exactly what I was talking about. So I think, in that respect I think we’ll probably keep it quite quiet. Not because we don’t want to involve our friends, but because there’s largely little point in involving your friends to that extent, because they probably won’t really understand what you’re going through and all the different stages. I mean possibly sort of at the, you know, after embryo transfer, when I can tell them and say, Look, I’m waiting to find out if I’m pregnant or no at that stage maybe. But even then they’re not going to get the, the depths of, of fear and the intensity of feelings that surround it, because they haven’t been there. And it’s very very difficult to understand unless you’ve actually been through it.

I think there’s a lot to be said for not telling people that you’re going through fertility treatment. We, we were fairly circumspect initially and we kept it very much to ourselves. But when we did start to tell people you would get advice, much of it, you know, kind of fairly unwelcome, and from people with three kids. And you would be like, Well, what do you know? You, you haven’t been where I am now I would have a friend who would say, you know, Well, I’d definitely go for IVF And I would say, Yes, but you haven’t had to. You don’t know what it’s like for me. You don’t know the reasons that I’m choosing not to go down that route I think also when you tell people, there’s this kind of sense of people saying, Any news And it would be like, Well, if I was pregnant I would tell you And that was tough. And I think also then sympathy does have a shelf life as well. That was something that I came across with friends. You know, it’s seven years now that we’ve been trying for children, and you do have to get to a stage where you, you stop talking about it because I’m bored of hearing about it and, you know, I can’t expect my friends to be endlessly patient about the whole, the whole situation.

Did you feel very isolated? Was it sort of the experiences that you were going through that your friends had no understanding of?

It can, the whole process of infertility can be very very isolating. I have friends who’ve chosen not to have children, and I have friends who have chosen to have children, who have had three or four children. The thing was, I felt as though I, I couldn’t really relate to either camp. My friends who had chosen not to have kids, their experience was very different to mine.