Sara Marshall-Page
Co-founder, IVF Babble
Tracey Bambrough
Co-founder, IVF Babble
Right now, you might feel like you’re the only person in the world who understands the pain, loneliness and heartache of infertility. But you’re not alone.
IVF is tough. Infertility can make you feel like no one understands what you are going through. When people keep telling you to “relax and it will happen,” you probably feel hopeless and panicked. It’s not uncommon to pull away from friends and family as you try to deal with the disappointment of negative pregnancy tests, month after month.
Sharing personal experience
We have both been through it. We’ve experienced both the emotional pain of failing to conceive and the physical pain of fertility treatments. We truly understand the feelings that go hand in hand with infertility: the isolation, the frustration and the sadness. As the founders of IVFbabble, we can relate to the hours spent trawling through medical sites searching for clear information, only to be left feeling totally overwhelmed and confused.
That said, we also know the incredible feeling when we could at last say, with insurmountable joy, that the journey was worth it.
Looking back, there are a few things we both would have done differently when we went through the IVF process. We would have reached out to others going through IVF. We would have asked our doctors more questions and we would tried to better understand why we were failing to conceive.
Creating a platform of support
However, there just wasn’t anywhere to turn for help, other than confusing forum-based information. That’s why we founded IVFbabble – we wanted to give people both a support centre and a repository of reliable information.
Every person’s journey through fertility treatments is different. The right treatment path for you will depend on the cause of your infertility, your age, your overall health and whether you are using donor sperm/eggs/embryos. Shockingly, your eligibility depends on where in the country you live, with some counties offering three fully funded cycles of IVF and others offering nothing.
The World Health Organization defines infertility as a “disease of the male or female reproductive system defined by the failure to achieve a pregnancy after 12 months or more of regular unprotected sexual intercourse.” We know that people are struggling with infertility at record numbers all over the globe – the number is thought to be one in eight couples. That’s why we’re committed to breaking down the taboos, sharing our stories, and providing a reliable resource for anyone dealing with the pain and frustration of this most heart-breaking condition.
