Day 3 - Can’t you just put it off a month or so?

I don't know why this bothered me so much because I am sure that for people who haven't dealt with infertility a month doesn't seem like a long time. For me, however, each month adds to the sad accumulation of days sans children.

Last night a friend of my DH showed up at dinner time, so we invited him to stay—that kills me that people just drop by at dinner-time! Anyway, over dinner he made the suggestion that we join them for a short one week cruise to Alaska near the end of May. What a nice idea.

OK, I have to back up by saying that we really haven’t told many people about what we are doing. It is just that for the most part our friends are all pregnant or have kids or we just don’t feel like explaining the whole thing. We are also fairly private people who share our details with a few of our closest friends because not everyone in our circle needs to know how and when I am being drugged, poked and prodded. I don’t want to hear “So how is it going?” at every turn.

So I try to be casual about it and say,
“Yes, that is a nice idea. We’ve got a few things going on this month, so we’ll get back to you.”
“When do you think you can decide?”
“Not sure, we can’t really make any travel plans for the coming month," figuring this would put things off.
“Why not?”

So at this point I realize that there isn’t really any way out of this except to say, “None of your business” which might not have gone over very well or we could lie and fabricate some lame excuse. Instead, I try to be brief and just say that we are going through some medical procedures.

“Why, what’s wrong?”

Well, I could have gone into a long rant about how rude that is to ask people about their health, but I caved and blurted out, “We are doing IVF this month”.

He looks at me with a puzzled expression “I-V-F??”

I almost laughed…he really had no idea what I was talking about.

“You know, in-vitro…..” tick…tick….tick…his brain working….tick…tick…

“Ohhhhhhh…..” He gets it, “I see. So what is involved in that?”

I didn’t even begin to get into it. I gave a brief explanation that we don’t really have exact dates of when things will happen because it all relates to drugs, my body, my and the alignment of the planets (kidding),and as a result we can’t commit to anything until the end of May.

He replies, “Can’t you just wait a month and start in June?”

Yeah, why don’t we do that. I guess this is why we didn’t tell him about it in the first place.