Couples undergoing IVF treatment learn a lot on their journey: how to administer medication dosages; self-administer injections; manage multiple moving parts of a process; and, how to keep it together emotionally during the whole process—at a time when it might be easier to just fall apart. For those who have been through it, infertility treatment makes you wiser and teaches one or two things you might have done differently–as was the case with Rosemary and Andre.
Rosemary and Andre have a beautiful six-month-old baby girl Elise conceived with the help of Dr. Bradford Kolb. Rosemary became pregnant on their third round of IVF when she was 41 years old. While she wouldn’t change a single thing about her beautiful family, there are two things she might do differently if she had the chance.
1. Bed rest means just that: resting in bed.
Rosemary remembered, “It was kind of annoying just lying in bed. The first month I was on bed rest, they were still allowing me to drive myself to my doctor’s appointments and that sort of thing. I would then rationalize in my brain, ‘well, I can go to lunch as long as it’s local because I’m just sitting in the car and just going to sit at the restaurant.’”
“But after my first hospitalization, my doctor said, ‘you are on bed rest. You get that, right? If anyone wants to have lunch with you, they have to come to you. If this happens again, you are going to be in a hospital bed.’ And I didn’t want that.'”
“But yeah, it was annoying not to leave the house. My big outing was to sit in the backyard, but it wasn’t too bad. It would have been much harder if I’d had another child who needed me.”
2. I would have started treatment earlier.
Rosemary stressed that “given my age, I would advise getting help earlier. I kept thinking, ‘Oh, I got pregnant before on my own. We don’t need help.'”
“But it took us two years to get pregnant. I know that lots of people try much, much longer. Plus, the shots and everything you go through is all very draining and emotional. I would say at the first sign of infertility, just go in and see a doctor–even if it’s just to see your OBGYN at first.”
She added, “I should have followed that advice instead of saying ‘it’s going to be fine and everything is going to work out.’ It wasn’t and it didn’t until I got help from HRC and Dr. Kolb.”