Help, They Need Somebody

A friend asked yesterday what she could do to help another friend who's going through IVF. She asked because Lisa and I went through three rounds of hardcore infertility treatments in 2003 and 2004, none of which were successful. For good or bad, we've never been shy about talking about it.

The short answer to the question is that there's nothing you can do when your friends are dealing with infertility. The one thing they need -- a baby of their own -- is impossible for anyone outside of the medical community and certain higher-level deities to bestow.

Infertility affects people in a bunch of ways: there's the emotional strain of wanting a child but not being able to produce one. There's the time strain of constant doctor visits and checkups and at-home routines. And obviously there's the financial strain. Probably the craziest part of all this is that it all happens at relatively low doses over a very long time. See, when someone dies, their loved ones need a lot of attention and support right away, and it's usually easy to think of ways to help them out. With infertility, people go about their regular lives with all the medical craziness like a constant white noise.

Probably the best thing you can do for your friends is to be there if and when the individual cycles don't work out. Infertility treatment is more than popping some pills and waiting. It's an incredibly complex series of events that culminates in either success or failure; a friend who knows when to look for the dips in the rollercoaster is worth their weight in Estradiol.

When our third and last cycle seemed to be working and then suddenly ended, two of our friends did the most amazing thing: they arranged for us to spend the weekend at a resort up in Asheville. Like most extravagant gestures, it was wonderful, but it would have meant just as much if they had just brought over a homemade dinner. When you're in the cycle, there's a lot of hope and optimism, so when you learn it was for nothing, people like those I just mentioned stand out like diamonds.

IVF is different for everyone, and learning about the different techniques employed by each clinic is a huge task, so the last thing you can do is be a broker of information and people. One of the reasons Lisa and I will talk to anyone about what we went through is that we would have appreciated the same ourselves at the start.