Booking Myself in for ART

Lifeslurper has overdosed on too many books relating to ART, IVF and being too old to have babies.

All I need is for someone to write the definitive Oh No I am Really Old and Now it Seems My Eggs Are Rotten tome and I might have something I can relate to.

Wobbles and I were having a leisurely browse through one of those mega-American book chains. Inevitably, I found myself before the female health – fertility section. Looking through the titles I found instant recognition, for I already have many of the same volumes at home on my own shelves. As I looked through the shiny new spines, I finally realised something about myself; I have spent my entire life looking for the answer in books. Seeking comfort and reassurance for all that I find confronting, entertaining, curious and perplexing.

Only thing is, there is no way any book is going to make me pregnant.

Possibly the remote chance any book helping me conceive might be if I strap a few to my ovaries and see if their collective wisdom helps me to grow some seriously good quality follicles in huge numbers. I would call this protocol Fertility Literature Osmosis.

As I made way through the many feet of shelf space I realised it was simpler to zero in on the few titles I did not already own. Since this sorry attempt to conceive first began, I have commenced a slow and steady project to collect every published title which ventures into the subject of infertility. Before anyone could say ‘Sheila Kitzinger’ I had started a slow march to Amazon, eBay, and every new and used book store within a 100km radius looking for the perfect book. THE book that would help me fall pregnant, or at least make IVF seem that little bit less arduous.

Seems everyone has an opinion. Seems anyone who was even momentarily considered infertile has written a book on the experience. We have all heard of ‘Chick Lit’ yet there is so little mention of ‘Conception Abstraction’

To me, these books seem to fall into a few main categories; I had a baby despite what everyone said, and stay away from that reproductive technology stuff and have a baby the natural way but make sure you drink lots of vile tonics and bathe in the dust of ground down unicorn hooves. Then there are quite a few ‘we did one IVF cycle and we got pregnant…see, it is not that hard.

I would love to see a book by a ten plus tour of duty IVF veteran. A survivor who has suffered miscarriage, countless investigative operations, the loss of various essential reproductive ‘bits’ and has the FSH injection site bruises to prove it. Now that would be a story!

Fertility books after a while begin to feel like financial investment or weight loss titles – overwhelming in number but light on ultimate worth. So many conflicting ideas, no real clear path as to who might have the ‘correct’ idea if ever there could be such a thing. Trouble is, this Lifeslurper does not have the reproductive time to experiment. I feel gripped by fertility-challenged indecision most of the time, and the knowledge that Amazon returns a massive 29,704 results for an “infertility” subject search does not settle my growing sense of unease.

More and more ART seems like a big venture into the greatest unknown we could ever have imagined. For the time I have left I will keep searching for some written form of comfort. It might be the closest I ever get to fertility success.