I am in my early 30s, happily married and since I can remember, I wanted to have a family with kids. Most of my friends and relatives tell me to just have them; the problem is that I can’t, because I am suffering from infertility. At the beginning, I felt so alone with my feelings, but over the years, I learned that almost 1 in 5 couples have some problems to become parents, the fact is that just nobody speaks about it.

Our society has dramatically changed – in a good way – in the last decades. People including celebrities can openly speak about all sort of things that would were not imaginable years ago, and these things have in the meantime luckily transitioned from being “abnormal” and immoral to a normal part of our life (homosexuality for example at least to some extent). Also psychiatric diseases like depression are not stamped as “abnormal” any longer, but have received awareness in our society that needs to be addressed. Infertility however remains a thing that is better not spoken about in public. In her recent autobiography, Michelle Obama started to talk about miscarriages and in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) in public and I admire her for doing this. I wished that more people would start opening up about this topic to raise the awareness of infertility in our society so that at some point people like myself do not need to suffer in silence any longer. I don’t know where this is coming from, but somehow infertility seems to be too intimate to talk about, as if talking about it would mean to describe your sex life, but it is just a disease like any other.

I am not a celebrity or any other important or famous person, but with this blog post, I want start talking about this serious issue, to encourage other women doing the same, so that at one point infertility will become a normal part of our lives and that unaffected people are aware of what infertility really means.

I was diagnosed with Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS) about one and a half years ago after I did not menstruate for 1 year. As I was trying to get pregnant, I was admitted to a fertility clinic where I started treatment with the purpose of inducing ovulation which does not happen with PCOS. Unfortunately, after having taken many drugs I am still at that stage, hoping that at some point in the future, my biggest dream will become true. I don’t want to write about the medical side of things, but rather about the strong emotions and the hopelessness that I am facing.

Infertility sucks. It really does. It is a rollercoaster of emotions, exacerbated by hormonal drugs that make you lose control over yourself. This treatment is emotionally so demanding, that some couples fall apart and break up during it. Fertility treatment is not a part of your life that you have to endure, it takes over your entire life while your real life is coming to an absolute halt. Moreover, it keeps changing you both in a physical and an emotional way. Most people cannot imagine what it means to have fertility treatment, so I try to give some insights into my life: Infertility is a very variable condition that can have several different causes, so there are plenty of different treatments available. Unfortunately, every women is completely different and so is her response to different drugs. It is all about finding the right drug for the right person, which happens on a trial and error basis. I started with the most commonly used drug that is orally taken. Besides that, I did not respond to this drug at all, It slowly started to change my personality. I used to be a very happy and positive person, but very slowly I started to become depressive. I cried for days having problems to get up in the morning and do my job. My boss stopped giving me tasks because he thought I am having a nervous breakdown. Noticing the change In my personality made me feel worse, but it took some time until I realized that my depressive mood was mostly a side effect of the drugs. Since last October, I am under a more successful treatment where I inject myself with hormones on a daily basis (at least during the first half of the menstrual cycle, which can take up to 6 weeks). It requires close monitoring which means biweekly clinic visits with a transvaginal scan and a blood test each time. I am lucky that I have a very flexible job that allows me to organize these visits quite easily. What is a bit more challenging is hiding the bruises from all the injections, as I sometimes do look like a drug addict. However, the mental scars of this journey are much worse than the physical ones. I have seen so many different doctors who have examined parts of myself that not even I have seen that by now I have lost all my dignity. Being asked and talking about your frequency of intercourse with strangers has become a normal routine. This treatment is working much better for me, but it is still a nightmare. I sometimes feel so alone, despite being surrounded by people. The nurses in the clinic seem to have become my best friends (I do see them more often than my actual friends) and this biweekly clinic visits make it impossible for me to travel anywhere; I cannot even visit my family in my home country.

Although the desire to have a family is coming from a couple, fertility treatment is mostly affecting women, as they need to have the treatment. In my case, it is ‘my fault’ that we cannot have a baby, so in addition to everything, I do feel guilty and sometimes even wished my husband would find a better partner who would be able to give him a family. Yet, the probably hardest thing about infertility is not the treatment and the strong emotions but the uncertainty if this nightmare will ever come to an end. Hope is the only thing that keeps me going.

In the beginning, I kept this all to myself. I was unsure with whom I can talk and how people would react, but at some point, it has become too much for me to bear, so I started to open up and talk to people. This certainly was the best decision I have made in a long time. Most of the people have been a great support and I started to feel relieved. Telling my mum felt like a huge weight has been taken away from my shoulders.

However, talking about this opened my eyes that most people have absolutely no idea what infertility really means. Many people try to be helpful and nice, but honestly most of their ‘encouraging’ comments make me feel worse. Just to give some insight, I have collected some of the “best ones”:

1. “You are still young, you have plenty of time to have a baby.” I am so tired of hearing this, because I want to have a family now, not in 5 years. Moreover, it is scientifically proven that fertility rapidly decreases with age, so it will not become easier with time.
2. “You just need to relax and then it will happen.” I have absolutely no more words for this any longer. It is not that I do not believe in the connection between mental and physical health, but this is complete nonsense. Would someone suggest healing cancer by going on a nice holiday? – I clearly doubt that.
3. “I can give you my kids for one day and then you realize how exhausting they are. Be happy that you can still enjoy your life.” Seriously? I know that kids are exhausting and I know that not every day will be amazing, but I still want to have a family.
4. “Why don’t you just have IVF?” If it would just be that easy…. Do people know that IVF is a very complicated, physically and emotionally very exhausting process that is moreover terribly expensive and without any warranty of success?
5. “Making a baby is really fun.” Have you read the paragraph above what I need to do? The fun has long gone.

I don’t want to attract pity and I don’t want to make people think that I have the worse condition in the world (which I clearly don’t). I just hope that my personal story will be read and that it encourages other women in a similar situation to open up so that infertility will stop being the unspoken burden but will become a part of our life like any other disease.