Please, No More Stories About That Woman Your Friend Knew

Particularly lately, I've been getting a lot of those stories, "You know, I know this woman who had a friend who tried for years and years to have kids and did all these infertility treatments and it never worked. And then all of a sudden, 10 years later, she got pregnant!"

I know these stories are meant to be encouraging. And I believe they are true (except when people tell me that someone struggling with infertility suddenly got pregnant with multiples, naturally, in their 40s. My sister-in-law told me sextuplets. Wow! Really?! Doesn't that seem just a leeetle implausible?).

But I'm struggling now. I don't want to hear about what might happen to me, randomly, after 10 years, when all this other stuff fails. Like, "yeah, this horrible strain and pain and $25,000 is a waste of money and time and energy, but after you ___ (adopt give up relax) you'll get pregnant!"

Also, it's not like we don't know why we don't get pregnant naturally. It's nothing uncertain, in our case--though we pray, especially after this loss, it's the only reason. But I particularly hate it when people act like it's all a big mystery that nature will solve on its own. In our case, there is absolutely nothing mysterious about it. They tell us, at each IUI or at IVF, how many sperm there are. And we know whether that's enough or not. I'm not a pessimist, but I am a realist, and I know that it makes absolutely no sense to rely on random chance.

DH and I were joking the other day that statistically, we have about a 1% chance of getting pregnant each month, if sperm alone is the issue. So if we just have sex faithfully at ovulation every month for 8 years, then maybe, just maybe, we can be someone else's friend of a friend of a friend of a sister of a cousin.