Oh Canada and all your beautiful diverse people

Happy Canada Day! Today I wanted to talk about diversity. This morning I had to be at the hospital for my day 2 ultrasound. The waiting room was packed as soon as I walked in and  I was 10 minutes early, so I was surprised that I wasn’t the first.  That made me realize that all of us, despite how different we are on the outside, are the same on the inside. We are all there because we want to have a child but for some reason, all different reasons, cannot do it naturally.

As I looked around the room I saw so many different races, body types, ‘looks’, age and sexual orientation and I loved it. We are a country built by diversity and physically we are all different, but inside we are all the same. It doesn’t matter how much money you have or how healthy you are or how thin or large you are – when it comes to infertility, it can affect anyone.

I ended up having a discussion with a girl next to me while we waited. The whole day was a bit disruptive. The couple ahead of us lost their health card somewhere, somehow and we were all helping them look for it. This issue caused the process to be put on hold and we had to wait a little longer than normal. Those types of situation prompt conversations and interactions with other people, which I find interesting. In fact there was an article posted in the  New York times stating that human interactions was key to living a long life (NYTimes Article). Because the couple needed in the change room to look for their missing health card, the lovely woman next to me made a joke that she was in no rush to get prodded this morning and we all laughed. I took this opportunity to speak to her about this whole process and how insane it really is.

Her situation is different than mine,  although we are the same age, she was diagnosed with endometriosis at a young age and was told she’d never have kids. Now she’s going through the IVF process to try at least once to know that she did all that she could. Her last round was canceled because she didn’t produce any follicles on day 10. If you remember from my last round and why mine was canceled, it was the opposite – I had produced too many follicles and they were concerned with multiple births.

Another woman walked up as we were discussing our situations and told us this was her 3^rd round of IUI and that she had gotten pregnant once with IUI but lost the fetus and tried 2 rounds of IVF and both were failures.

I think the biggest frustration I have with everything is that people assume because we are doing this that we will be successful. I want to remind everyone that that may not be. And we have to be okay with it. You don’t have to tell us it will happen, we know it might not and frankly, we are prepared for that.

A friend told me once, “before you enter the fertility process, you already have to grieve never having children”. And she is completely right. The positive in all this is that we have these amazing opportunities to help us now at least.