How do you recover?

[Ticktock40]

’m struggling after having a couple of pretty shitty years. I had a late miscarriage at the very start of the first lockdown and since then have been suffering from grief/ depression. (Are they different, I didn’t know?!) I had counselling for a while which did help.

We started IVF over the summer after finding out we had secondary infertility and after being ecstatic to get pregnant on our first go, we sadly miscarried a few weeks later. I’ve had my second transfer this month (frozen this time) and have just found out it hasn’t worked.

How do you recover? I miss the old me and just feel so sad and broken. We’re lucky to have more embryos in the freezer but I don’t know if I can keep putting myself through this.

Any suggestions for self healing would be great or is it just good old ‘time’ that helps?
Thanks in advance.

Time does heal although it's such a cliche saying and I used to hate it when people said that to me (I had primary and secondary infertility and then 4 miscarriages 2 ectopics then embarked on a long road of ivf). I think the worst bit is that everyone moves on around you and expects you to do the same. I have a little Notebook I wrote things in - quotes etc - things I knew would make others uncomfortable if I tried to say out loud. That helped me a lot. My ectopics left me infertile - I found counselling useless as the counsellor - to me - had zero clue what that was like.

You do need to go through a grieving process - not only for the baby - for the person you once was. I'm out the other side now after 5 rounds of IVF but I won't ever be the person I was before.

Don't set a time limit on when you'll feel better. Everyone is different. You said secondary infertility so do you already have a child? If so I planned lots of things with my eldest - and planned for a life it just being the 3 of us and actually that helped me see that it wouldn't be so scary after all and we'd be able to give her an amazing life and opportunities (not that we couldn't do that with siblings but it would be different you know - things like paying for private school or university etc)