Saturday, March 19, 2011

5 stages of TTC (grief process)

Well as of this morning, we are officially onto month 18. This week was really hard for both me and Aaron separately. Thursday was my day, yesterday was Aaron's day to struggle.

We have the next round of medication to get ready for the next IUI which will be at the beginning of April. We are just working hard at moving on, but it's like a grieving process:

1. Denial - this can't be happening to me, we still have a chance

2. Anger - I am pissed why can't we be given our dream?

3. Bargaining - please God, allow us to have a baby?

4. Depression - sadness over having to move onto the new month

5. Acceptance - time to prepare for the next month

Yes these are the clinical stages of grief but they completely apply to going through the monthly up and downs that come into play with infertility issues. Everyone has to go through these stages at their own pace and it will be difficult to deal with. The problem I had this week was that everyone seemed to want me to jump right to step #5 without allowing me to go through steps #1-4. I know that I would get to the acceptance stage, but for me one of the hardest steps to get through is the anger and sometimes I need to be there for awhile before moving past.

We are working forward now...no more backwards thinking. Aaron and I talked about it at great length the other day - we are not going to stop the IUI process until we jump to IVF if necessary. My body reacted terribly when I went off the hormones last time, I became very sick and my immune system went crazy. I am not going to do that again. We will continue to just go through this until the summer time when we can jump to IVF without really disrupting my work schedule. It's the right thing to do.

No comments:

Post a Comment