Welcome to IVF This, episode 137, IVF and Waiting Well. Hello, hello, my beautiful friends. I hope you are all doing so, so well. If you're listening to this and wondering what happened last week, we did not have an episode drop last week, which would have been the day before Halloween, October 30th.

because unbeknownst to me, I had a kidney stone, a Bruin, and I got hit with a kidney stone and an infection. It was super fun, zero out of 10 recommend. It was not an experience that I ever cared to relive. So that is unfortunately, and my poor planning and timing was why you didn't get an episode last week. So I'm very, very sorry.

I'm bulk recording a few, so you will have episodes throughout the holiday season, into the new year, and I am feeling much, much better. Thank you very much. All right, so we're gonna talk about something that I talk about with every single person that has ever gone through IVF. It's a conversation that I wish I would have had with someone when I had talked about doing IVF, when I had gone through IVF, when, you know, all of those in-betweens. And that is this idea of waiting well.

And I wanna put a little bit of a disclaimer as a couple of disclaimers, cause you know me. Number one, again, cafeteria style. If the types of questions and the three or four topics or ideas around waiting don't resonate with you, that's not a problem, right? Everyone is different. I think I'm gonna offer you like three or four examples on how to think about waiting differently. I gotta tell you,

a couple of them were something that were suggested to me that never really resonated for me. I'll tell you the one that really resonated for me, but it doesn't mean that those are applicable, or I'm sorry, it doesn't mean that those are not applicable to someone else, right? It worked for me, might not work for you, and vice versa, and that's totally fine. So as always, cafeteria stop, I want you to take what works for you. Don't feel pressured or that you have to live up to some expectation. Nobody's grading papers here.

I just want you guys to feel calmer, more peaceful, more grounded throughout this entire process. That's the goal. And number two is that you don't have to change anything about your weighting. How you weight, right? The title is weighting well and I want to put well in air quotes because there's not like a gradation. There's not like a good way to weight and a bad way to weight. It's just how you weight, right? The question is how do you feel while you're weighting?

how you think about how you're waiting and how does that impact and influence that time in waiting, right? I can think, I think back to, you know, we tried for like 18 months before we got pregnant with our oldest and I did not feel good throughout the pregnancy. Like I was constantly waiting for something horrible to happen or something like that. So I kind of looked back and especially like the postpartum after I had him, I had terrible postpartum depression and anxiety.

that be better than me, I did not get medicated, I did not seek help for that, do better than Emily in many respects, but certainly that if you feel like you're having postpartum depression or anxiety, please talk to your OB-GYN, talk to your family practice doctor, make sure that you get the support that you need. But I can remember looking back once I kind of got out of the depression, out of the anxiety, out of all of it, and I remember thinking I really...

wish that I had valued that in between time more or I wish that I had valued waiting a little bit more right because I'm the type of person that I am I'm always constantly looking on the horizon for what's next what's next what's next what's next and I find that there are many periods of my life where I've missed out in the present because I was so focused on yes let's get there let's get there it's like hurry up and get there and then I look around and I'm like oh this is cool

And then, well, what's next, right? Again, be better than Emily. That's why we're doing this, so you guys can learn from me. All right, so waiting well. Again, it's not, the air quotes are on well, right? There's not a wrong way to do it. There are unhelpful ways to do it. There are unproductive ways to do it, but it's not a good, bad, binary sort of a thing, okay? So, what we...

what we kind of think about when we're waiting, because there's a lot of waiting in IVF, in infertility, in life, let's just be honest, there's a lot of waiting in life. But for infertility, right, you're waiting two weeks post-ovulation to see if you got pregnant. And then if you didn't, then you're waiting the period where you stop bleeding so that you can start trying again, and that cycle rinses and repeats every 21 to 28 days, right? It's a...

horrible aspect of human nature, but that is what it is, right? IVF, there's a lot of waiting, right? One of the first things that most doctors, I know my doctor and several other clients have said their doctors say, is that IVF is a marathon. It's not a sprint, right? So it could be four months until you get your consultation appointment. It could be three weeks before you get your first scan. It could be two months later.

after you know if you have to have procedures or tests before you can even start medication. There's medication before you start stim medication and then you're on the stim medication then you do your egg retrieval. There's waiting to see if you get any embryos. If you're doing testing for embryos then you're waiting for those results then you're waiting for transfer like you are just it's a feels like a perpetual state of waiting and that is excruciating.

Like I know I'm here to talk about the mindset around waiting, but I think we can all collectively agree it's excruciating, right? Not to mention if you experience a miscarriage and then have to wait, if you experience a failed transfer and then have to wait, right? There's not an aspect of the weight that's involved with IVF that's like, cool, this is exactly what I wanted. I was so hopeful that this would take weeks and weeks and weeks, right?

we can all collectively agree that waiting is excruciating. What I wanna do is try to make the waiting less excruciating, right? Just give you other ways to think about the waiting because I guarantee you, even if you had the best mindset in the entire world around waiting, like you welcome waiting with open arms, all of the discomfort around scarcity and all of that, there's still going to be times, the most seasoned professional mindfulness coaches and therapists still get annoyed at waiting every once in a while, right? Whether it's in the coffee line or traffic or something that they're really looking forward to, right? So the fact that you get frustrated around waiting is not actually a problem. You're human, you're normal, it's okay. We just wanna make it a little bit less excruciating. That's the goal, okay? So.

What do we do, right? Mindfulness, right, the type of coaching that I focus on is what we want to do. It's what we want to implore journaling, stillness, meditation. Those are centering around thoughts and emotions, and these are great, great tools for kind of coping with the stress of, kind of the intense stress, I should say, the intense stress of IVF and infertility, right? These kind of

big peaks and valleys that we experience, mindfulness, stillness, meditation. Those are excellent, excellent mechanisms for managing those ups and downs, the anxiety and things like that.

Waiting is different, right? We can choose to pause and be still and meditate, but you often can't control whether you're waiting on something or not, especially with IVF. And so that's kind of where it feels more difficult. That's the rub for a very Texas phrase. That's the rub with wait times. They're often imposed on us.

not of our choosing, sometimes they are, right? And that's beautiful because you can take ownership that comes from a very empowered place. But a lot of times it's someone else telling us you have to wait or you need to wait, right? And so there's a lack of autonomy. There's a lack of agency that we feel around those things. And that's what makes it a little bit more difficult. 

So the agency, the autonomy. And when we're in that sense of waiting, when waiting has been kind of thrust upon us and we feel that loss of agency, we feel that loss of power, we almost can't imagine, because we don't have the agency, because we don't have the empowerment, we often can't even imagine what waiting would look like. Because then it's just this existential dread and fear and anxiety, because it wasn't our choosing.

So it's not like when we decide to take a break, we're consciously deciding, oh, I'm gonna do this with my time. I'm gonna go travel, or we're gonna do this or that, right? Those weren't of our choosing. So it makes it that much more excruciating. Okay, so I'm gonna stop talking about why waiting is so excruciating, because I think we can all agree it is and how and why. So I want you to think, the number one option, just how you start to reframe some of these things.

I want you to start moving beyond the feeling of waiting and towards the cause of the waiting. Okay? We've already established waiting is excruciating, waiting is painful, waiting is frustrating, wait and what?

Waiting is all of those things and many more, right? We all have our own very specific thoughts and feelings about waiting.

I want you to pivot. Waiting is, and it will be those things, and that's okay. You can feel those things. You've already felt in your lifetime a lot of pain, a lot of frustration, a lot of resentment, a lot of anger. You can handle those emotions. I want you to pivot, and I want you to start thinking about why. Why are you waiting? Are you willing to wait? Now, let's say you've had a failed transfer, and...

Your doctor's protocol is to wait two cycles before you can go into another transfer cycle. Are you willing to wait for that? At the possibility again, trying to get pregnant, right? It's gonna be frustrating. You've already got a lot of grief going on. Can you also wait? Are you willing to do that? Are you willing to wait for the procedures and the tests so that you have the best information going into a new transfer or a new STEM cycle? Right, what are you willing to wait for?

If we already can acknowledge that waiting is hard, then we can pivot. You've gotta acknowledge it first, right? We're not minimizing, we're not shoving it down, it's uncomfortable, it's frustrating, it's all of those things. Once we do that, then we can pivot to what you're waiting for and why. You wanna give your body and your mental, emotional, financial health the best possible chance? So I'm waiting. Right, my doctor has found good success.

in post failed transfer, you know, renew transfers by waiting to two cycles, let your body re-regulate, let the hormones re-regulate, and then we move forward, right? That's okay. You can be frustrated and know why you're doing something at the same time. In fact, often when we do that, when we're willing to acknowledge the feeling and what we're doing, doing it for like the motivation, it kind of dims the light of that feeling.

So that's number one. I want you to move beyond your feelings for the waiting and towards, I want you to turn towards, pivot towards that cause. Why are we waiting? What are you willing to wait for?

Number two is I want you to embrace the ways in which wait times are not in between times. Right? The way that a lot of us, especially me, totally me, focus on wait times is that they're the in betweens. Right? We are. Well, I will say, I say this all the time. The in between is the hardest. The in between is still time. It is still part of your life. Right? I spent so much

push past in so many different ways the in-betweens. But really it was still part of my existence. The only thing that I missed out on was being present in that in-between, quote unquote in-between time, and just wishing it to be over. But there were so many little beautiful moments in the in-betweens, they still exist. We just can't see them when we're so hyper-focused on what's next.

And believe you me, this is a daily effort for me to try and stay focused and stay present in the moment. So like if you feel like that's not even an option, it is an option, I promise you. It's something that if you want to work, I promise you, if you want to work towards it, you would be right with me. We would be in that together. But there is, I think that the, we tend, no, no.

The in-betweens we often use is like a holding pattern until we get the resolution that we want. My personal practice is to identify what I hope will come, this is what I've been working towards, what I hope will come on the other side of my waiting. Right? Not just this thing that I want that it's not here and that makes me angry or that makes me sad or whatever.

But my hopes, I focus more or try to focus more on possibility rather than what is missing. That tends to help me. I get the feeling that a lot of you who listen to me, we have very similar approaches. So I find that focusing on possibility rather than lack is where I get more ease.

in the in-betweens. They're still gonna suck, they're still gonna be hard, and they don't have to be as hard. So focusing and allowing yourself to think about and believe in the possibility is gonna give you a little bit more mileage to maintain some of that grounded neutrality that we talk about all the time.

Oh, this was actually something I wrote a long time ago about waiting. Waiting pulls us into the present unlike any other experience of time. In the waiting we realize that this moment is meaningful as it exists, not as some step towards a future moment. Waiting is present tense and its meanings are full of the potential to transform the ways in which we see the world. Each moment is its own experience and its own fulfillment.

I was feeling very poetic that day, but I stand by that paragraph. 

Okay, I've got two more real quick. The first, the third one rather, is this is something that I have to work on a lot. I want you to decouple lack of productivity from being forced to wait, right? So if wait times offer new visions of new possibilities that we just talked about, right, then wait times can be productive.

but it isn't really currently how we view things, like socially or anything like that. Instead, wait times are often seen as robbing us of productivity. And when we're productive and working well, time speeds up and we hardly notice, and right, right. So when we wait, time is like so noticeable. Like inescapably noticeable, right?

Yet it like we just continue in that pattern of like, I'm being robbed of something because I can't be productive. But waiting, wait times are necessary for us to find kind of creative outlets, ways that our soul needs to rest, ways that our bodies need to rest, ways that our minds need to rest. That is productive. Healing is productive. Healing is an active verb.

Right? And so I want you to kind of decouple this, weight is not productive. It is, it just looks different. Productive for one person isn't the same as productive for another person. And so I want you to kind of decouple weight and productivity, because they're different things. Weight productivity looks different than non-weighting productivity. And that's okay. It's not a good or bad, they just look different.

And then, oh, number four, so there were five total. I'm really good at my job and can remember counting. Five total. So number four is I want you to think about using wait times as an investment in your social support, your community, okay? Now, this is kind of a sticky wicket. I threw out another, I think that's just a generally US Southern idea, but the problem with

socializing is that you're gonna get a lot of questions. You're gonna get a lot of comments, you're gonna get a lot of asinine statements, things like that, right? So you wanna be careful. You wanna curate the most loving and supportive hangin'.

Just let me do that. So I want you to think about strategically curating a support network, one person, five people, 15 people, but tell them what you're hoping for, what you're needing. I don't want you to ask about the process. If I bring it up, great, feel free to ask all the questions, but don't unsolicited offer advice or ask questions. I want you to understand how tender of a time and topic.

this is for me, right? If there are a few people in your life that you can do that with, and investing that time, I went so radio silent when I was, really I kind of go radio silent if I'm dealing with any anxiety or depression, period. My very good friends kind of know that and tend to ping me and like, I know you're going through something I can tell, right? But that's a virtue of

me kind of cultivating that, right? I try to be aware of when I go radio silent, but I would radio silent for years with some people during like the thick of our infertility and IVF journey. Some of them I haven't even been able to reconnect with and that's okay. Like I'm very much a friends come in seasons and things like that, but you don't have to go radio silent. Radio silent is an option.

And a lot of times it's gonna feel like a safer option because community and comments and questions and unsolicited advice, things like that, that feels dangerous, right? I get you're in a conversation and I get that there's no physical danger, but you're putting yourself in emotional, the potential for emotional damage, the potential for emotional pain every time you encounter those.

So if that is something that you want to invest in, is that social community, that social fabric, do it. Lay some groundwork for yourself. Set some boundaries, some parameters. Give the people that you love and care about and want to invest in a playbook for how to help you. Right? That people cannot read our minds. The only way they can do that is if we tell them what we're thinking or if we write it down for them. So give those people that you want to invest in the benefit of the doubt

that help, that support. I know it's self-ascribed, it's okay. You can tell them what you don't wanna hear, what you wanna hear, how you wanna be supported. You can be instructive like that and people can still love you, I promise you, promise. All right, and last but not least, and I covered this many times, so I'm just gonna say this, get angry. If you need to, get angry. Not all wait times are created equal and they're not. Waiting for a delayed flight.

is much different than waiting for the PGTA results. Okay? Waiting in line in the supermarket and running late because of traffic to your doctor's appointment or a morning scan or your retrieval or something, you can get angry. You don't have to be completely zen. It is okay. When you're able to come back down, find an emotional release, scream, cry, sing to the top of your lungs,

best song for your mood, kick, run, do something with your body to burn off some of that anger and then come back to some of the stuff that we talked about, okay? I promise you the wait times, it's not necessarily that they get easier, but you will get better at managing them, right? Where it doesn't feel like you're constantly in between, like we talked about.

where you're constantly at someone else's beck and call or where IVF revolves around, like the IVF is your entire world. It doesn't have to be that way. I know it feels that way. And I'm gonna talk a little bit more about that idea. Like IVF has become my world. But for right now, I want you to think about some of the things I offered in terms of the weight and waiting well. And that is what I have for you, my friends. I hope you have a beautiful week and I'll talk to you soon. Bye bye.