How do you move forward after failure?

This post is part of the Ask Me Anything series I’m running on my blog. To submit your own question, use the form below. Here’s the original post that talks about what I’m looking for.

On to the question!

How were you able to go forward with another cycle after your first failed? I feel like it is consuming my life… I feel angry and sad all the time that my first cycle failed and about my infertility in general. I’m about to start at a second clinic after my first cycle ended in a chemical miscarriage and I feel totally hopeless.

I get this question fairly often. I think—I think—it has to do with the fact that infertility is an exhausting beast that sucks our energy and spirit. It crushes us when the best treatment doesn’t work. Because if this didn’t work, this state of the art mother-fucking science that all but appears to be foolproof…then will it ever?

I’ve been there. I went through seven embryo transfers, so I like to think I’m pretty savvy in the moving-forward-after-failure department. After all, if I did my math right, which could be debatable because I suck at math and it hates me too, I have a 28% success rate when it comes to IVF. Seven embryo transfers and two kids. Throw in three other IUIs, and nine other rounds of Clomid/timed intercourse treatments (in the infertility world, sex counts as a medical treatment sometimes—huzzah) then I actually only had a 10% success rate. In other words… I failed 90% of the time.

Ninety percent of the time, my fertility treatments failed.

Sobering.as.shit.

So how did I keep going? Since this reader asked this question quite a while ago, I’m going to go ahead and say she did a second cycle. If you’re reading this, I commend you.

Because moving forward is freaking hard.

Especially after a failed IVF cycle. There’s so much time, money, and emotions (and shots and doctor visits and ultrasounds and missed work and so on) put into this and it’s freaking exhausting when it all fails and you’re left to pick up the pieces.

Back in 2013, I did just that. I picked up the pieces from the mess of my first IVF cycle and we forwarded on. And I know not everyone can do that for a variety of reasons. I know of people who have done eight IVFs and I know people who did one and they were done like Donkey Kong. IVF is so hard. It’s so so hard and it’s annoying and frustrating and you can feel so unbelievably alone.

I think it was a combination of things that helped me forge through another IVF.

1. We got approved for a guarantee program. This would help us financially because we’d either get all of our money back if the subsequent cycles didn’t work, or we’d be guaranteed a baby, but obviously be out a lot of money.
2. While the IVF was hard emotionally, physically I was more or less OK. I’ve said through all my IVFs that I can do these all day. I can do these cycle after cycle after cycle because it was pretty much my entire world.
3. I was persistent as fuck. Seriously. Bitch never stopped. I all but ruined my body, finances, and well-being for a baby. Was she worth it? A thousand times, yes. And it’s not to say at all that people who decide to stop treatments or pursue another pathway to a child are any less badass. Not in the least. I wasn’t a particularly strong person. I didn’t have much faith. I was just persistent to the point of sheer obnoxiousness and knew if wanted a baby I’d have to crawl through fire (AKA a shit ton of fertility treatments) to get there.
4. Once we got our first baby, we were left with three frozen embryos. This was never our case for our IVFs, nor for our first donor egg cycle, but it was for the second. For us, we knew we’d use all those embryos. So after the first FET failed for us in October of 2018, as much as I was hurting, as exhausted as I was from all this freaking infertility, we knew we’d go ahead in the next few months and try one. more. time.

So, my path isn’t going to be everyone else’s. One the cycle that worked, the one that got us Olivia, we knew this was it. We knew if it didn’t work, we’d be done. We’d live our lives without children. And then, we got her. And when we were facing the last cycle with our last two frozen embryos, we knew we’d be done with fertility treatments after this. If it didn’t work, we’d live our lives with our one precious miracle baby. Both of my kids resulted from That One Last Cycle. And maybe I should be throat-punched for that because I know—I know—how obnoxious that is to read. I got really fucking lucky that those two cycles worked. That those two out of, what? 65 cycles actively trying for a baby? That those two worked.

I don’t have any advice for those of you facing a failed cycle and wanting to know if you have it in you to do another. I’m not you. But this is my story, and my thoughts back through all the treatments, and this is how it worked out for me.

Bottom line: You know yourself and you know your limits. You know what you’re capable of. You know your financial situation and your ability to inject yourself with a finite number of medications and how much of this you can emotionally, mentally and physically handle. Trust me, you’ve got this.

Read the entire Ask Me Anything series

Click to submit an anonymous question

You can also use the form below