Another setback? + 17 months

Have delayed a bit before sharing this news: we await written confirmation of it. But as it's now been more than a week since hearing, and still no letter, thought I would blog away.

I rang IVF Wales on April 10th to check on waiting lists. The change of healthboard happened on April 1st, so we were expecting more clarity. The lady I spoke to asked if we'd had "our letter". I said no. She explained one is on its way, and will confirm that the wait is now 21 months.

That means August for the start of treatment. Which is annoying.... not only because it's another delay but also because, by then, we will have to make decisions about Jon's next job (Bristol funding ends in September.) We don't want to limit the future by staying in the jurisdiction of IVF Wales. But nor do we want to give up on a year and a half of waiting, so close to the end.

It takes a while to digest these disappointments. I was fairly despondent for a week or so. But you come to terms and plan around them. You work out how you'll manage, come up with a plan. I feel alright, now.

Each time the landscape ahead changes, I realise how much I've started to depend on future moments. The golden 18-month marker being the most recent. And then that's taken from you and you are bereft. But you also realise that the dependency wasn't a good thing, anyway. Nothing in the future is certain, so you're always likely to feel disappointed if you depend on any part of it. Which isn't to say it's possible not to - as human, time-bound beings - but I think it is possible to get better at doing it less.

Anyway, not sure why the letter hasn't arrived. Maybe things have changed again since I phoned. Maybe not. Onwards and upwards......

Waxing philosophical

Reading Alexander McCall Smith's 'The Careful Use of Compliments' recently I was struck by this:

"Kant [...] would have acknowledged ... that each baby should be treated as an end in its own right, and not as a means to an end. So one should have a baby because one wanted that baby to be born and to have a life, not because one wanted the pleasure oneself of having a baby."

Most of the conversations I hear about children are about 'wanting'. Do you want children? When? How many? Boy or girl? How much of a gap between them?

Much of that is just the way people talk: it doesn't necessarily indicate a selfish attitude. It's too easy to judge others on the basis of such conversations when one is childless oneself.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to consider: is my reason for seeking pregnancy born of compassion for a potential person as yet unborn, to whom I can help bring the gift of life? Or of my own wanting - a biologically and status-anxiously driven consumerism that compels me to possess a child?

I realise that thinking about such things is a luxury. Choice played no part in conception and birth a few short decades ago. But now it does, and along with the new-found freedom of choice goes the responsibility to try to choose well. And it's rather nice, in fact, to have been given by infertility the space to reflect on things like this and then to make my choices more carefully.

Incidentally, the book also acknowledged that Kant probably had no idea how to change a nappy.