Babies in the waiting area...

[meadowlark3]

What do you think about babies in the waiting area of your clinic? A couple came to our clinic and brought their small toddler (perhaps 18 months) and the baby played and babbled in the main waiting area. It seemed to make lots of other patients quite uncomfortable.

It surprised me to see a small child running about and wondering what others think.

xx

I can't believe some of these comments tbh

it is a waiting room, not a sanctuary

Seriously podrig?! Of course it's different!! I despair at the heartless of some people. Making life harder for yourself?? You mean harder than the heartbreaking shit the barren army have had to go through, the daily fight they put up not to completely breakdown in the dentists nevermind the ivf clinic where they may be waiting to be told there is no more hope.

For god sake people, LET IT GO!

Guiness feelings aren't jokes, they just are what they are. How dare you tell me what I should feel?!

I think you are in a wind up tbh guiness.

*zoe
Not sure why I wrote guiness.

eh, was that aimed at me?

Secondary infertility is worse you say?

Yes it should have said I think you are on a wind up tbh zoe.

No I'm not in a fucking wind-up. Why should I be? I went through hell conceiving my first child. But I had a life outside fertility issues (despite nearly dying after an ectopic). That wasn't the case second time round, when I was confronted with what I wanted most on a pretty much hourly basis. That may sound unbelievable to you but that's how it was for me. If that doesn't fit your rule book for How Feelings Should Manifest, well what am I supposed to do about it?!

Perhaps start by not coming onto a board in infertility section, full of variously hurting and grieving women with zero children, and demean them by telling them that their experience of being childless is easier to deal with than yours was when you only have one child?

Sorry sorry keep forgetting. Only mothers know what life/love/reality is really all about etc. Childless women, Know your place! Bottom of the shit heap.

Well said OP.

Zoe you are entitled to feel however you feel of course but it is insensitive to air those particular feelings here. It feels like a stealth boast amongst women who don't have you have, and fear that they may never have.

As Beanhunter, Blue and many others have said in better words than I can - please show some empathy. You might not understand or agree but realise that some people might be upset around children in sensitive surroundings.

Why is this different from a dentists or a tube or a supermarket?! Talk about making life hard for yourself..... someone else's baby doesn't take from your struggle or reduce your chances.

Seriously?

My fertility clinic waiting room was (despite the lovely staff and pretty decor) one of the most tense and miserable places it has been my misfortune to spend a lot of time.
Perhaps a separate waiting area with children's toys and books to (subtly) encourage patients with children to use that space instead of the main waiting area? But there are probably situations in which people would feel that could be inappropriate too.

podrig, your comments are as stupid as they are crass. Either way give yourself an uppercut.

Bloody hell, what an unpleasant thread this has become. If you've got a child, and you bring that child to the IVF clinic, and doing so causes some silent upset and grief among the other patients... I don't see why it makes you so angry and indignant that other people feel upset. Most clinics, as we've seen, allow you to bring your children - so, as things stand, you can do whatever the fuck you like! Bring a child, bring two, bring your entire extended family. It doesn't matter, in practical terms, that other people are upset - most clinics are designed in a way that is convenient for you. Why come on here and slag off the people for whom the status quo that suits you is painful and difficult?

And it's great that many people take hope from children resulting from IVF. However, statistically, IVF is overwhelmingly more likely to fail than to succeed. And some people, after 3, or 5, or 9 attempts, have a fairly complicated relationship with hope, as it keeps us doing something extremely punishing to our bodies and our minds. Positivity is great until you realise it's kept you on a hiding to nothing for years on end. Everyone will have different experiences. It's not always a matter of 'reframing' and seeing the happy in things. Sometimes you need to be able to be fucking sad before you can move on with your life. This is the stage a lot of people in clinic waiting rooms will be at.

Bully for you if fertility treatment isn't your whole life. Since you've got such a rich life why don't you go live it then, and stop haunting infertility threads and slagging off people who are still in the thick of a very distressing and hellish experience?

Why is this different from a dentists or a tube or a supermarket?! Talk about making life hard for yourself..... someone else's baby doesn't take from your struggle or reduce your chances.

When I'm at the supermarket I'm personally not waiting to find out the potential future of our family. Is there any hope or will the results show that our chances of ever becoming parents are diminishingly small?

At the dentist the very core of my identity isn't being challenged - that I'm not able to do as a woman what I'm supposed to do. Or as a man with MFI on the other side of the coin.

Someone else's baby doesn't reduce my chances, it's just a sad reminder that as my chances are so low, here's what I am probably never going to have, being paraded in front of me when I'm sat waiting to find out how low my chances are.

It might also be considered crass for someone who's beaten cancer to come to a cancer support group and then tell all and sundry that actually life having beaten cancer is so much harder than life with cancer. That could indeed be exactly how it feels for that person - but it might be considered insensitive for that person to come specifically into a cancer support group and vocalise their feelings to everyone in the room. Who are terrified they'll never have the opportunity to find out for themselves whether life after cancer is indeed as hellish as they're being told it is. It might be considered more sensitive for someone who's beaten cancer to show some sympathy for those who are where they once were, instead of berating them.

I really don't think you can compare primary infertility where you ended up with a child with primary infertility where after years of treatment, ops and multiple cycles you do not succeed.

As difficult as this thread has been to read at times I'm glad it was started.
We're due to start out first round soon and babies in waiting rooms doesn't bother me, yet.
But I can absolutely see why it would be awful the further down the road you go and having read this thread if I'm ever in the amazingly fortunate position to be attending the clinic for a second child I would never take my child in with me.
Equally I can understand why you may want to show your baby to the staff who helped create them but I now think personally i would do this in the form of photographs and thank you cards/letters.

Sorry, long post, but I'm a bit emotional today. Just to echo some of what previous posters have said here: there are infinite ways in which infertility in all its forms can be horrendous.

When I was TTC for years without a positive test, I used to think 'if I could even just have a miscarriage, that would be something - I'd at least know we could get sperm to egg.' Then I had a miscarriage, and that felt absolutely shite in a whole new way, and it didn't feel like any sort of progress. I remember thinking, 'I'd just like to have had the experience of a full-term pregnancy - I'd just like to know what it is that everyone's always talking about, that unique experience of what a woman's body is apparently built to do'.

And then I had a full-term pregnancy that ended in stillbirth, which felt absolutely shite in yet another new way. On balance, I'd have rather lost my daughter at 8 or 9 weeks than gone through a whole pregnancy only to have her die and have to bury her. An early miscarriage would have been 'easier'.

But then after the stillbirth there were several more miscarriages at 8-9 weeks, which were also awful, and didn't feel like a 'better' experience than a full-term stillbirth - miscarriage upon miscarriage after stillbirth was clearly the worst experience ever.

The fact is that at each stage along the way I was having something that I, at a previous point in my life, had longed for. The excitement of a positive test. All the self-satisfied moaning about the discomforts of pregnancy. The people cooing over my bump and being excited for me and buying me things. My friends who already had children excitedly welcoming me into 'the club', inviting me around again for the first time, following years when we didn't have much to talk about. Having something happen, even if that something is repeated, heartbreaking loss, is a different kind of awful from having nothing happen for years and years.

Not having any children isn't just an accumulation of all your failed attempts and losses, it has massive implications for your social life and your role in your wider family and how people respond to you.

I have no doubt that secondary infertility is a differently nuanced kind of awful I won't be able to understand because I haven't experienced it. But that doesn't mean I don't remember the kinds of awful that I've experienced before, or that they're not valid, or that they weren't actually awful, or I didn't know real awful.

I don't think anyone on this board thinks women with children are evil or selfish; I think what pretty much everyone can agree on is that this is hard and that even if your success doesn't feel like success to you - even if your child or children, however much you love them, complicate your experience of fertility difficulties and contribute to a different sense of loss - that doesn't mean other people are immature or wrong to feel the rage and despair and anger that this whole process brings.

Bip - I'm so sorry for the loss of your daughter.

I'm sorry if it came across as a stealth boast. It wasn't intended to. The couple in question weren't there because they wanted to show their child off, they were there because they were having fertility treatment. Which given the agonies involved, tells you a little bit about just how much they want a second child.

As for the rage at having no positive outcome, for years - I'm not a monster, obviously I can understand that. But the reverse side of what BIpBippadotta very eloquently describes is that pain is pain, and that while others might try to impose a hierarchy on what people have gone through, it doesn't really match up to the lived reality. When my son was born 3.5 months early the emotional trauma was so extreme I wished many times that I'd never even begun on the path to parenthood. In retrospect, it made my ectopic feel like a walk in the park. But at the time of my ectopic, it felt like my world was falling in. Both experiences of pain were equally valid, but in the grand picture of how I've processed the stuff that's happened to me, one looms enormously larger than the other.

And in fertility terms, having to sit through toddler groups where every single one of the 15 other women there were pregnant with their second child and talking about it non-stop was a particular kind of agony that I don't remember experiencing first time round. That's not to say that I can't imagine the deep agony of thinking you might never be a parent, because I remember that too. But that couple with the toddler who look like they have everything you are wishing for? Their life hasn't suddenly become all sweetness and light, even if you understandably think that it should be. And like it or not, they may not have had other options. None of the suggestions about what they should have done with the toddler match up to the reality of what it's like finding short-term care for a very clingy 18 month old. Boasting loudly about their success in a fertility clinic waiting room would be crashingly insensitive, but their child just being present because there is no other option for them is a harder issue. Should they be barred from fertility treatment because they already have a child? That's the reality of what banning children from attending appointments could mean for some women.

to Bip for all the horror that you've gone through

Thanks for the . I am now a week off having another baby, and FWIW I can't stand going into the maternity unit because of all the healthy happy babies there. But I fully expect plenty of other people (waiting for a d&c, waiting for pathology reports after a stillbirth or miscarriage, etc) can't stand sharing the waiting room with me, either. How could I possibly blame them? I guess the thing is, I don't get to dictate how other people should feel about their own circumstances in the face of my ultimate good fortune. Whatever else has happened to me, and even whatever else does happen, right now I am fucking lucky. I don't expect strangers to don't know my history; I fully expect to be a target of their projected rage and envy. I don't begrudge them that. That's how it is.

Zoe with the greatest respect I don't think anyone is saying people with existing children should be banned from fertility treatment. Nobody here is planning on lobbying the NHS or private clinics to refuse treatment to the secondarily infertile (the NHS is doing a good enough job of restricting treatment as it is). What most people seem to be saying is it would be ideal if there were separate waiting rooms for people who bring their children with them; that the majority people with children generally find a way to be sensitive about this, but some notable exceptions do not and this is upsetting for everyone and it would be really nice if there could be some provision made.

I think this thread demonstrates just how got-at everyone can end up feeling when undergoing fertility treatment at whatever point in their 'journey'. We're all full of fear and anger and all those awful feelings of social exclusion that come from not being mothers, or not being 'real mothers' (I do know that people say this sort of shitty thing to parents of only children), or whatever. We're also up to the fucking eyeballs in synthetic hormones half the time, which, in my experience, doesn't help with the rage.

I also think we should all be given a little leeway for feeling the anger we do, and letting off some steam here. Nobody wishes any harm to people with children; that's too literal an interpretation of the pain and envy we feel. But I do hope that if other people see this thread they may think twice about popping into IVF clinics with their babies to bring cards & flowers for the staff, pose for photos, etc. There so many other lovely ways to show your gratitude and appreciation without needing to involve an unwilling audience of countless anxious, grieving strangers.