The Waiting Room

(the actual and the metaphorical)

And we wait.

There is pain and inertia and unknowing in the depths of the hours we sit within - and without - our news, our outcome, our relief and heartbreaks.

Oftentimes in the realms of trying to conceive there is talk about the two week waits.

This isn’t a piece of writing about that fortnight shaped timeframe we know and don’t love. These are words about all the other shades and hues of waiting we endure, from the seconds that feel like a month to the longitudinal years of uncertainty of the shape of our future.

Schedule unknown

From the moment we decide to try to get pregnant we are in a brand new dimension of time. We are now waiting for something to happen. No one tells us how long that’s going to take. We arrive with our unique sense of what the timetable might look like. I expected mine to be a brief wait at the station - I ended up stood there for five years. Sometimes I was laid on the platform floor as other trains flew past me over and over - and oh how I got to know the waiting room…

The Waiting Room

The NHS Fertility Unit waiting room I first sat in was accessed via the maternity unit - but of course. We waited in queues of smiling couples and their green maternity notes. Some had pictures of the position of the baby on them, I remember once, someone had drawn a smile on the baby. I can still see it if I close my eyes.

The room itself had a large picture of three teddy bears playing cricket with the ambient sounds of women having their HSG tests. They didn’t always sound like they were OK. I don’t think any of us were.

There is a particular atmosphere in the medical waiting room. We sit so closely to other humans living through the same kind of ordeal of us. And we rarely, if ever, speak to each other. Our narratives spin around and mingle in the ether. We might wonder about their experiences, are they worse, are they ‘better’, do they have children already? Are they happily married, is it the sperm or the eggs under the firing squad? All those stories, where do they go?

Women get called for scans, men get called to ‘that’ room right by the receptionist and the toilets. Couples come, couples go, local radio pains us, the magazines are old. Perhaps the last times we were here - and the things we were told - float around us like medical ghosts.

Our bodies are there too.

As someone who supports women with anxiety in their fertility journeys, the somatic experience of our bodies in these spaces is of particular interest. The fine layered trauma of anticipation of consultations, results, internal scans, our bodies under scrutiny - it stacks. We wait on plastic chairs, jiggling our feet, trembling our hands, the consultant running late.

Trying to conceive and waiting for information are such cognitive spaces. We research ahead of appointments to be ready..but we can’t think our way out the physical, embodied experience of being braced for something. Our body is in waiting too - fight or flight or freeze. We can’t leave our body behind. So. In no particular order, as someone with a black belt in waiting - here’s how I tend to waiting room (and the frequencies of waiting)

We can…

Radically distract ourselves while we wait, when we can’t do all the things we think we should be doing to wait well. Cinema, boxsets, phone calls or time with our excellent humans that make us laugh and feel undefeatable and, loved. Colour it in, make with our hands, walk with our podcasts, whittle the time away as best we can.

In the Waiting Room we can utilise the breath (breathing in for five and exhaling for three), we can look around the room and situate ourselves in time with things we can see and hear, we can take thing with us that ground us (favourite scents, pebbles to hold, playlists to drown out the local radio, hands to hold). We can hug our arms around ourselves discretely and tell ourselves it’s ok, that we are safe.

We can know that the stories in the room will unfold, ours and theirs and that somehow we will be OK and that things can change on the flip of a coin and - we never really do know what’s coming next.