Scared to Start? Me too.
Written September 21, 2024 - 6 months before Cycle 1.
Procedures? Scary. Artificial hormones? Scary. Needles? Scary.
But that's not what I’m scared of.
When you start IVF, or talk about starting IVF, there’s a very real “oh shit” moment. Suddenly, you’ve surrendered your family to science, trusting in today’s technology rather than the natural abilities of the human body. You hand over your family’s future to a medical team, blindly trusting their guidance along the way.
It's terrifying.
I remember when I was diagnosed with POF, I was in my teens and at the time I really didn’t think twice about IVF. It was more of a “oh yeah, I guess I’ll have to do that” but never a
“Shit, I DON’t have any choice BUT to do that.”
Fast forward to adulthood, being a married woman, learning more about my body and my diagnosis, all while seeing the women and couples around me both intentionally and accidentally get pregnant at alarming rates. The knowledge I had from the doctors telling me I cannot get pregnant on my own was immediately met with “well what if we are the special case - what if I can and they just missed it?”
I was so unwilling to surrender fully to science that I tested my ovulation for MONTHS, often 3 and 4 times per day for many of those months. I kept hoping to see a positive test, thinking “it only has to happen once.”
And in all that time, I got exactly one “positive” test (we’ll talk about that at another time).
Month after month, day after day I was seeing negative results. It's like my brain was stuck on loop - “it only has to happen once. It's negative now, but it only has to be positive once.”
That's when I turned to support groups, fertility content creators on TikTok and Instagram, and ultimately it was in those moments that The Donor Egg Club concept was born. I was tired of feeling negative, tired of feeling “less than” the world around me.
I was tired of feeling like I was disowned by my own body.
Everybody on those platforms talked about IVF as a beacon of hope, the light at the end of their tunnels (when they first started…..the journey itself is a hard one at best). And I remember thinking “I am so glad they feel that way, but why don’t I?”
I realized that the reason I wasn’t seeing IVF as a relief was because I grew up with the opposite view of fertility. I knew IVF was in my path, that was as normal to me as natural conception is to the couple that has 10 kids by 32, but natural conception was my “what if,” my “this could totally work if we just try!”
Adding to the dichotomy of feelings was the fact that I not only knew IVF was in my path, but I knew donor assisted IVF was in my path. I knew, because of my history, no fertility doctor would even consider putting me through an attempted egg retrieval. They had no testing, no data proving I would even be successful in retrieving one egg.
I knew that IVF meant I would have a child that was not genetically related to me, and that was terrifying.
My options were to hope & pray for a miracle and get a child genetically related to me AND my husband, or submit fully to science and get a child that was only genetically related to my husband.
And I had to sit with that and try to choke it down for a long time. To be honest, I’m only a few months from starting IVF, and I’m still trying to choke that one down.
I feel so grateful, so thankful that I have a biological sister willing to quite literally share her body with me, and I will never take that for granted. I know how fortunate I am, and that not everybody has the same gift. But a gift - no matter how big, shiny, or irreplaceable - can still be bittersweet.
If you’re at the start of your journey, if you and your partner are questioning how you’re supposed to submit to science and take this leap, if you’re terrified of the journey ahead despite all the hope it offers - know you are seen, you are heard, and you are not alone. Your emotions are valid, even if you can’t quite find the words to articulate them.
