I am up to my 5th time doing this IVF business... And yet, somehow, my head doesn't quite get used to the strange warping of time while I am in an IVF cycle.
I find that life gets divided into "before cycle", "in cycle", "after cycle"... Like the other day, I called up dad because I felt as though it had been SOOOOO long since I had spoken to him. Then I realised it was only about 2 weeks,.. less actually? I couldn't even work it out. I thought about all that had happened since then. Not much really. Just me going to work, and giving myself needles. I really didn't have anything newsworthy. So why did it seem like a lifetime ago?
... Before cycle.
A coping strategy for me is to try to stay somewhat straightforward about day-to-day life while on a cycle, to just go through the usual motions of life. I learned this after the rollercoaster of cycle 1, that it might be better for me to remain in a state of emotional equanimity, just focus on getting through while I'm getting through, and wait till the end to rejoice or fall apart.
And on that note... when the outcome is clear, I just let myself feel what I feel. There's nothing more to do. Let the feelings come and flow through. Because I know that eventually I will bounce back. I am like that, resilient. I am grateful for that.
So I think that I have learned to stay in balance, yet, I cannot help but get a warped sense of time that disorients me. Perhaps it is because IVF is itself a way of playing with time. Extracting all these eggs that would usually take a year or longer to come out, but doing it in one month. Or maybe it is because I am injecting myself day by day. It could be as simple as there being so much talk about timing and dates of procedures. I am starting to wonder if it is because I have introduced a competition with time... trying to beat the proverbial biological clock. This disorientation is time's way of fighting back.
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