The Power of Friendship can be the Saving Grace
by Charmaine Graham
Published by Creating Families Magazine, Winter 2012
I have always been the kind of person who takes pleasure in the company of friends. I find deep satisfaction in sharing and enjoying the beauty and difference in people’s lives and getting to know their perspective on different experiences. As an extrovert, I have always had a lot of friends and I have always felt fortunate to have them, knowing I could trust my friendships to sustain me through all of my life’s ups and downs. But the day my world crashed, the day I heard those three words – “You are infertile”– I realized that because I knew no one who was infertile, I was very much alone. Horribly, completely and absolutely alone.
Published by Creating Families Magazine, Winter 2012
I have always been the kind of person who takes pleasure in the company of friends. I find deep satisfaction in sharing and enjoying the beauty and difference in people’s lives and getting to know their perspective on different experiences. As an extrovert, I have always had a lot of friends and I have always felt fortunate to have them, knowing I could trust my friendships to sustain me through all of my life’s ups and downs. But the day my world crashed, the day I heard those three words – “You are infertile”– I realized that because I knew no one who was infertile, I was very much alone. Horribly, completely and absolutely alone.
The weeks that followed my infertility diagnosis only exacerbated that feeling of isolation, as well-meaning friends said dumb things like, “Well my kids drive me nuts; you can have one of mine,” or, “Wow, I wish I had a problem getting pregnant. My husband only has to look at me and I have another baby,” or my favourite, “You just have to relax.”(Of course, we all know taking deep breaths and meditating can miraculously open up completely blocked fallopian tubes.) And, while my husband’s love for me was never in question, he became overwhelmed with my pain and was unable to completely understand the depth of my grief. For the first time in my life, I felt like I had absolutely no one – honestly, I didn’t have one person around me who understood.
Of course, as the shocking revelation of my infertility seeped into my reality, I found myself having to manage my own grief while at the same time making my infertility more acceptable to those around me. I pretended that I was strong, that it didn’t matter, and that their advice was helpful when it wasn’t. For those friends who were clearly uncomfortable with my infertility, I did everything I could to keep them from abandoning me entirely. It seemed unfair to me that I was propping other people up when I was the one who was suffering, but I also knew they loved me and just didn’t know what to say or do. After all, no matter what they said or didn’t say, did or didn’t do, none of them could solve my problem. None of them could give me the child I so desperately wanted.
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As a result many of my friendships started to feel rather empty, and my sense of isolation increased. Can you relate? Personally, in my efforts to cope, I decided to try and embrace my infertility. I promised myself that through education, determination and hope, I WOULD have a child, even if it meant through IVF. I hit the Internet with a vengeance, reading about different clinics, procedures and statistics, and researching everything I could.
However something incredible happened to me along the journey to educate myself on the specifics of artificial reproductive technologies: I found a website called www.ivfconnections.com . I registered and signed in, expecting to learn more about different clinics. |
Instead, I found real-life stories about real-live people enduring, and sometimes
not
enduring, their infertility journey. I found discussions about everything on that website: IVF by country, infertility by diagnosis, men discussing infertility, debates on donor options, lining issues, alternative treatments, and even a great thread called IVF veterans (though, at the time, this thread scared me to death because I did not want to be posting there in four years, still without child).
One thread in particular caught my eye and seemed like a good place to start. It was entitled “cycle buddies by month,” and it presented a forum where you could talk with other people who would be starting an IVF cycle during the same time period. So I posted, “Is anyone starting an IVF or IUI cycle in June?” And then I waited. Lo and behold, women from all over the world started responding, and within just a few weeks, I was part of an online group of women who were going through exactly the same thing I was. I felt such a sense of relief in hearing from others who would be cycling alongside me that I started really embracing these web friendships. I decided to treat each one of them as I had wished people would treat me.
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There were probably over 50 women who at one point or another contributed to my original posting, but within a few months a clear and cohesive group of 18 had begun to develop. We always were online talking to one another, and we even picked a name for ourselves:
The Hen House
. We remembered each other’s online aliases, and we kept a chart of where each member was in her respective cycle. We sent each other cards and gifts with hilarious hen photos and other ridiculous trinkets for birthdays and “pick me ups.” We offered each other support and laughter on a daily basis as we embraced the hell of making a baby in a Petri dish.
The Hen House quickly became one of the most important aspects of my daily life and the ladies in our group developed a bond that, still to this day, I cannot explain. While you could argue that our friendships were based on the common bond of infertility, individually we had far more differences than similarities. Each one of us and each one of our situations was completely unique. Male-factor infertility, female-factor infertility of various forms, primary infertility, secondary infertility – everything you could imagine.
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Some of us talked openly with the world about our issues with infertility; others never even told their own mothers. We had different skin colours, different ages, different religions, different cultural beliefs, and we spread across five different countries. We had different approaches to friendships, relationships and life in general. But we ALL shared two incredible things: 1) the inability to become a parent just by making the choice to do so, and 2) compassion and acceptance of our differences.
As the Hen House group developed, we learned to talk to one another and to share each milestone and devastation with each other with grace. We acknowledged tears when one became pregnant, and we openly talked amongst ourselves about feeling left behind as a result. The pregnant hens never left our sides. We acknowledged our jealousy and feeling of injustice when three of us did “a transfer” all on the same day, but only one of us – Tess – got pregnant…with triplets! We told Tess she owed the other two of us each a baby for being so selfish. Later, though, we all waited together in agony to see whether Tess would live through one of the most medically devastating and severe cases of hyperstimulation ovarian syndrome her specialist had ever seen (while hospitalized with OHSS, she had gained over 70 pounds in water retention alone). Once again, we all stuck close to our phones and computers when those three fragile little babies were born at just 26 weeks and almost died.
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We helped support each other by raising funds on eBay for another hen, Marissa, who miscarried identical twins and then needed money to adopt a child from Guatemala. Another hen, Maria, created over 80 eggs in one IVF cycle (44 fertilized) when at the time some of us who couldn’t create even three were upset. But Maria didn’t get one baby out of that lot and some of us then became grateful we weren’t in her shoes. One hen, Jane, who lives in New Zealand, got pregnant on her first IVF and then gave birth at 38 weeks to a stillborn baby girl and then found the Hen House. We all grieved for her over the loss of her daughter and supported her future cycles. Nine cycle transfers later, she stopped her treatments without a baby, only to become pregnant the old-fashioned way at age 43 and again at 45. We were so happy for her. I was blessed to meet Jane and one of her children just last year when she came to visit me. What a joy!
Another hen, Lynn, was the first to have twin baby girls. Wow. We thought she had it all. But then, after a few more cycles, she lost a singleton pregnancy and two more sets of twins. In fact, with one twin pregnancy she held her gestational four-month old child in her hand while he was still alive via the umbilical cord, as he was delivered as a result of an incompetent cervix. She held her son that way for over 90 minutes while her husband drove her to the closest hospital they could find – they were on holidays.
We endured pain individually, and we endured pain together. The worst of it was when our beautiful 28-year-old hen friend Angela, and definitely the sweetest of us all, died of a massive heart attack in the eighth month of her pregnancy. We were heartbroken as we watched Angela buried with her dead daughter Grace in her arms. We watched in awe as Angela’s mother gave a quilt she had hand-made for her granddaughter Grace to another hen, Karen, who had just had a baby. Karen had received some left over medication from Angela (and a third hen, me, drove it across the border) because she didn’t have enough money to buy the medication for her IVF cycle that resulted in her pregnancy. That quilt was passed along to each hen as each new baby chick was born or adopted by one of us. But we also learned to celebrate our lives, infertile or not, as Angela’s death had so poignantly reminded us to do. |
Eight of us went on a trip to Florida together. A trip we named “Hen Fest”, and in a giddy drunken stupor thought we were so cool when we ridiculously convinced a tattoo artist to use henna and draw hens on each one of us. One in particular, Christine, made us all laugh so hard we peed our pants for five days straight, and she was definitely the instigator of most of the trouble we got into! Six different hens flew in from all over the world to celebrate with me when I adopted my son Macarthur, and another bunch of us flew to Texas to hold a baby shower for Marissa. One hen on vacation from Ottawa to Florida made three side trips to visit three different hen families just last month.
We gasped in worry when one hen, Tammy, remortgaged her house to do the only IVF they would be able to afford, and we laughed in hysterics when she got pregnant and joked that her son would be paid off by the time he started Grade 5. One hen, Rita, was told she’d never have a child even with IVF. We supported her decision to try anyway and celebrated her twin boys’ birth. And later yet we laughed again in hysterics when she got pregnant the old fashioned way with a daughter. Holly broke our hearts when her FSH registered so high that IVF probably wouldn’t help. Happily, Holly had one son through IVF, and we all prayed impatiently for four days while she struggled in labour. Hen Carrie was so dedicated to our group she detoured on a road trip over 1000 miles with one-year-old twins just to visit another hen.
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One hen, Tonya, donated eggs to someone in need and later had her egg recipient offer to be a surrogate. We joked about stealing sperm from our husbands and sharing it with one another. We joked about many things others, outside of the infertility arena, would think was nuts but the Hens always understood. We learned to say “congratulations.” We sometimes had to say “I’m sorry.” We had tiffs, of course, but it didn’t really matter because we had something much bigger:
a desire to share our pain because we refused to be alone in our infertility any longer
.
We had financial problems, we commiserated about bumpy marital moments, and we grieved together as life threw each one of us curve balls. But no matter what, we never cut each other out as a result of our own personal pain. We shared that pain instead. And now, we share the future together. In fact, “Hen Fest 2012” is planned for this April in Florida again and some will come from as far away as Hong Kong! (its 2013 now, and let me tell you, 2012 was a BLAST!).
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What does it all mean? I guess it all means this: If you are infertile, find a friend. The power of a real friend can be a saving grace. As much as people may often diminish online relationships, the friendships I formed online literally saved my sanity. And while friendship is never free and requires a lot of compassion and effort, it is always worth it in the end.
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In closing, let me tell you about one last hen, Kate, who was the only one in the Hen House not to have a child, even though she endured what I would guess to be close to 20 embryo transfers. Kate learned one day that her husband had a serious heart condition that almost always resulted in imminent death if not diagnosed and treated immediately. He was one of the lucky few to be diagnosed. At that point, Kate let go of her desire to be a parent and learned to be satisfied with a child-free life, full of travel, friendship and the love of her now healthy husband. I told Kate I wanted to write about The Hen House and I asked her what it had meant to her over the years. She replied,
“The family I so desired never eventuated, but the friendships I never expected sustained me.”
Need I say more?
Need I say more?