The Shipwreck

aka - my cancelled IVF cycle

It’s August 2014, in the Hotel Du Vin, York. I am primed with a cocktail of hormones, having a ‘non escape’ from the IVF cycle I am living within. I’m there with my Mum on a shopping trip I’m not really feeling. Will the trousers be worn only for a few months before I have a bump? Do I need to buy stretchy things anyway for my bloated drugged up stomach?

I picked up a call from my clinic. A kindly but bored sounding nurse confirmed my gnawing inner knowing that, this cycle was as of now, no longer happening - cancelled. I’d seen it coming of course. And hoped anyway that I hadn’t.

Do not pass go.

I can still clearly picture the details of that room, the room in which I broke my heart full of tears. I called Mark. I asked him this week about his memories of that call. He described exactly where he was, calling it a flashbulb memory burned into the road he was stood on. He still walks the long way round to avoid it. It’s a surreal thing to sit - or stand in the street - with the crushing disappointment of something that kind of didn’t happen.

Except it did.

Telling someone not well versed in the world of TRYING that our IVF cycle was cancelled is a flat experience. And that’s if we bother to tell anyone at all. It probably sounds a little like our hospital appointment got postponed. People nod, not really understanding.

The searing pain of not reaching any kind of finish line after all that investment is unique. But I see little written about it.

The Chance

What else gets cancelled when we don’t progress through the cycle in the textbook way we hope we will? The due date we peeked at, the timeline we thought we’d have in the weeks ahead, the possibility of this working, this time. The chance is snatched from our hands in tales of non responding, over responding, cysts, fluid, consultants not happy with what they’re seeing, curveballs and things we couldn’t script. It hurts like hell. We are poised and ready with nowhere to go.

When I look back upon the memory snapshots of the infertility years, I can see myself from above in that room, curled up in a ball, gut punched. The cancellation of that cycle, three years into The Quest felt symbolic of all our running to stand still. It arrived like a portent of doom that our shitty luck was never going to change, our ship run aground. It cancelled my hope out with a backshift key.

Dusting ourselves down.

It’s not quick, this business of assisted conception. It’s not cheap either. Picking ourselves up from a cancelled cycle is a feat of both physiological and psychological engineering. Our body needs to withdraw from the hormones we took, at a the pace of our clinics instructions. Someone needs to do something with the sharps bin (that took us years). Bruises need to heal, periods need to come, invariably a pregnancy announcement will arrive with clown like timing.

We adjust to the idea that nine months from now will not look like a big bump. We realise that another birthday will likely pass before we are mothers and fathers and we book the consultant appointment. Perhaps we’re ready to roll up our sleeves again and get stuck in. Or we book it with a sinking feeling of futility. Neither states are stable. We can feel both and seesaw between the two.

It Happens

And it happened to you. Maybe not many people witnessed that or knew. Maybe the acknowledgment you got were only crumbs. But I want to say that what happened is huge. It’s significant. It is shock and grief and a tree fallen in our road. It deserves to be seen for exactly what it is - horrible luck AND not a portent that luck will never change. That’s not how luck works.

So, if you’re reading this in the wake of a cancelled cycle know that this is an unkind event. But it doesn’t and can’t predict what comes next. Rest, let the shock dissipate, which it will. Take refuge in whatever feels like home. Know that your vibrancy can’t ever be cancelled.