Positive Thinking and IVF
So here’s what happened last summer with IVF cycle #3:
A few weeks before everything kicked into high gear, I went to an acupuncture appointment. The acupuncturist said to me, “There’s no medical reason you can’t be pregnant. Your only problem is that you’re not happy. Think positive and be happy, and you’ll get pregnant, no problem.”
First off, this was terrible advice to give me with only a couple weeks to go before treatment. Also, my fertility clinic had told me there were five different medical things wrong with me. And I was trying my best to be happy…how was I going to turn things around in just a few weeks?
But I tried…oh, I tried. I tried thinking positive to the point of being delusional. I tried to be happy, although how you’re just supposed to magically be happy all of a sudden is something that’s always eluded me.
And then my cycle ended with a chemical pregnancy, which means that technically I got pregnant, but my body was unable to hold onto the baby.
And I blamed myself--clearly, I wasn’t happy enough and positive enough.
“What baby wants to stay inside a mom that’s not happy?” the acupuncturist had said to me. My not being able to buck up had killed that baby.
Those were dark weeks. The guilt was overwhelming. My deepest fears surfaced--that I shouldn’t be a mom, I wasn’t happy enough to be a mom, I’d be doing any child of mine a disservice by bringing him or her into the world.
I had let bad/scared/conflicting thoughts into my head. And because I wasn’t able to keep them out, everything was doomed. There was no use even trying again--every baby was going to die and each time it was going to be my fault.
And then a friend sent me a book called Bright Sided, by Barbara Ehrenreich. Once I read it, I felt so much better. The author’s talking about cancer here, but I think this applies absolutely to those dealing with infertility…just substitute “infertility” for “cancer” and “not getting/staying pregnant” for “cancer spreading” in the following passage:
“…without question there is a problem when positive thinking 'fails' and the cancer spreads or eludes treatment. Then the patient can only blame herself: she is not being positive enough; possibly it was her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place. At this point, the exhortation to think positively is ‘an additional burden to an already devastated patient,’ as oncology nurse Cynthia Rittenberg has written. Jimmie Holland, a psychiatrist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, writes that cancer patients experience a kind of victim blaming:
‘It began to be clear to me about ten years ago that society was placing another undue and inappropriate burden on patients that seemed to come out of the popular beliefs about the mind-body connection. I would find patients coming in with stories of being told by well-meaning friends, “I’ve read all about this—if you got cancer, you must have wanted it…” Even more distressing was the person who said, “I know I have to be positive all the time and that is the only way to cope with cancer--but it’s so hard to do. I know that if I get sad, or scared or upset, I am making my tumor grow faster and I will have shortened my life.”’”
I’m back at this fertility business again, in the middle of another cycle. And this time? I don’t care about being positive. I just want to stay calm, do what I can to not lose these weeks of my life to worry and stress and obsession over numbers and progress and statistical chances. I’m trying to have a good attitude, absolutely, trying not to go to that dark, scared place that is so, so close. But I think I can get through things this time without blaming myself, even if I’m once again not pregnant/without a baby at the end of all this.
The doctors are doing their job; they’re very good at their job. Aside from following their instructions exactly, it’s not up to me. I’m not going to cause this to succeed or fail.
Oh, and I’m not going back to that acupuncturist ever again.
