Extreme Excitement












Big Kev












I am SO EXCITED for the conclusion.


Just the Starto

A month ago, I mentioned I was about to have surgery to *hopefully* find out why this pregnancy thing is so unreasonable a prospect for my 28-year-old-purportedly-perfectly-healthy body.


That surgery didn’t happen. Doctor #3 is from a different state and there was a delay in finding a hospital in my state for him to operate. The details are not important. Suffice to say, I prepared for some very expensive, possibly useless surgery and organised my life around its occurring. The cancellation left me depressed for all the reasons that the fertility industry destroys my spirit.

Promises broken, misinformation, and complete disregard for how this circus effects my life. (The fertility circus, in my case, being an immensely consuming 3rd job that I do not have the time nor the emotional energy to endure.)

So, when the nurse called me the week after #surgeryfail with a *real* date for my surgery, I politely asked her to email me the details.

fertility fuckwits
Dealing with the fertility industry.

With no email forthcoming (*gasp*), I resigned myself to the fact that I had exhausted every fertility treatment option available.

As a same-sex couple, there is a total of 2 companies in my state that will treat my wife and I. We had tried both. We had tried 3 doctors. We had gone through 5 IVF cycles (the full stim cycles, not the stick-a-frozen-embryo-in-and-call-it-a-cycle IVF cycles that uberfertiles love to whinge about). Almost 2 years had elapsed since this nightmare started. That qualifies as trying, surely. So, I decided, if they contacted me about the surgery, I would go ahead with it and *theoretically* discover why I’m barren A.F. If not, I would put this baby business to bed.

The surgery was, after all, an expensive exercise in regret evasion. Wouldn’t I regret not knowing why I can’t have kids? Isn’t that knowledge worth $7k? (Don’t answer that – I realise most answers will not be like mine.)

Last Wednesday afternoon, I got a phone call from the same nurse asking me to send the consent forms back. I still had not received any emails or follow up phone calls regarding this supposed surgery date and the whole thing reeked of fertility industry incompetence (FII). If she wanted something signed she’d better email it to me. But she had, she insisted. Problem was, she said, most of her emails went to people’s spam folders. (Perhaps Gmail has a fancy filter to protect infertiles from FII.)

Dubiously, I checked my spam folder and there they were; 3 emails related to the surgery, dating back 3 weeks. Surgery was scheduled for Saturday, less than 3 days away. So, I just said I’d do it.

Why not, hey?

knowledge is power
The pursuit of knowledge can be used to justify many stupid decisions.

Money, money, money

Over the course of this disgusting experience, I have lost track of the value of money. Having spent $50k to completely ruin my life, my physical health, my mental health, my career, my relationships with friends and family… any amount of expenditure that brings me any level of joy seems very legitimate.

$50 for a bottle of wine? No problem!

$200 for a fancy dinner? Beats IVF. Hands down.

$500 for a weekend getaway? Bargain!!!

$3000 for surgery which is probably entirely useless? (E.g. my upcoming exploratory laparoscopic adventure). That’s like a third of the price of an entirely useless IVF cycle, and far less time consuming. What fun!

I’m not even being sarcastic. I’m looking forward to it, because, honestly, the best that I can expect from life is a day off work to have useless surgery.

10 years ago, I baulked at paying over $100 a week in rent. (Those were the good old days.) Now, I am legitimately happy to spend thousands of dollars on bullshit surgery just because it’s more fun than work… or because I feel like knowing if there are hordes of free range endometrial tissue roaming though my abdomen.

IVF promises to make me poor in many indirect ways.

Waiting for Endo

In 5 days, I am having laparoscopic surgery to ascertain whether my faulty body has thwarted my attempts at pregnancy. Thus, I really hope I have severe asymptomatic endometriosis because at least then, I can have an answer. I can be told, ‘this is why you can’t have kids.’ I can understand why this has happened to me. I can give it a name and I can move on.

Two years ago, I can’t imagine hoping for a medical condition like I am now. Now I’m imagining the worst-case scenario as waking up from surgery and being told, “There’s nothing wrong with you. There is absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t be able to get pregnant.”

And that shit is getting real OLD.

Can you imagine, spending thousands of dollars on exploratory surgery just to find out that, as you have been told hundreds of times before, THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU?

I can. In less than a week, it will probably be my reality.

I am, most likely, physically healthy in every way.

The thought is depressing AF.

TBH, I do hate uberfertiles

Last night my uberfertile friend sent me a short message which ended with:

‘Miss you so much xx’

My first thoughts were:

‘Why is she doing this to me?’, ‘Why would she ruin my night like this?’ and ‘Where the hell does she get off messaging me?’

Then I imagined her lying at home with her perfect baby, lazily amassing gossip to pass the time. No doubt I’m a prized subject of said gossip, having been MIA from social events for the past year, busy becoming a tragic enigma.

shit fertile people say
Shit fertile people say.

We haven’t spoken in 6 months. The last time I saw her was at my best friend’s birthday party. After Mrs Uberfertile showed up, I struggled not too cry for the rest of the night, ultimately leaving early. I was a horribly unfun best friend.

I would have been furious at me. I was furious at me. I’m normally really fun at parties, instead I sat in the corner with my face in a margarita.

I apologised to my bestie the next day. She, in turn, apologised for inviting a pregnant person. I told her, quite rightly, that she shouldn’t have to screen her friends on my account.

I wish she had’ve, nonetheless.

I very much doubt that Mrs Uberfertile knows how much she ruined that night’s party for me, or how much distress she caused me in the week that followed. I’m sure she thinks I am thoughtlessly ignoring last night’s message, not dwelling on it and crying and wondering what to do with it.



If reply, what to say?

The truth is, I don’t really want to end the friendship with Mrs Uberfertile. I feel guilty about how I’ve treated her. It’s not her fault she’s uberfertile. It’s not her fault she lucked out with a good fertility doctor from the start. It’s not her fault her body is really fucking good at not killing babies.

The other side of that truth is, I can’t be friends with uberfertiles and pregnants and parents. At least not when my wife and I are trying so hard to hit the sweet spot between too much IVF and just enough IVF to avoid later life regret at not trying hard enough.

It’s not about babies for us anymore, it’s about what we have to do to console ourselves to childlessness. It’s about knowing, in 20 years’ time, that we did our absolute best to have a baby and we couldn’t have done any more.

So, why associate with people who have such disparate aspirations for 20 years into the future? They’ll never understand. Why should they?

I wish uberfertiles would just stop contacting me.

Infertility Showers: The awkward new trend

My wife and I were invited to a baby shower last year. It was to take place during IVF cycle #5. Throughout IVF cycle #4, I thought to myself,

“If I get pregnant, I might have the strength to go to this stupid baby shower.”

I used to LOVE baby showers. I don’t know why, but I did. I used to want a baby shower. I attribute this to being an inherently selfish bitch. The hosts of the baby shower were a couple I had known singularly for over 10 years and who met 8 years ago at one of my birthday parties. It would have been appropriate for us to go. It would even have been appropriate for me to invent some great excuse as to why we could not attend. In the end, I did neither of those things. My wife and I simply stayed home.

My wife, the fair minded, socially capable angel that she is, tried to encourage action on the baby shower issue. This ultimately led to an argument which concluded with me storming out asserting,

“I am not going to another baby shower until I get the most epic infertility shower the world has ever seen!”

“You CANNOT have an infertility shower,” my wife tells me. Underlying this is the pervasive idea that it is embarrassing to acknowledge infertility and certainly in bad taste to celebrate it. It’s like an ‘I-can’t-find-a-partner’ party or an ‘I-got-fired’ party (I have been to the latter BTW and it was perfectly enjoyable). People don’t know how to acknowledge and celebrate things that aren’t socially accepted triumphs. Do you need sympathy or what? You can’t do normal stuff. You’re deficient and now I’m supposed to rejoice in it? How?

Forgetting the invitees for a moment, let’s weigh up the facts, shall we?

Infertile women have, most likely, sacrificed their:

  1. Money
  2. Career progression
  3. Emotional energy
  4. Physical health and well-being
  5. Mental health and well-being
  6. Time

… in the pursuit of fertility.

Infertile women also have to deal with:

  1. People asking them when they’re going to have kids.
  2. Almost every woman they meet waxing lyrical on the stupendous greatness of being a mum.
  3. Almost every woman centric nugget of media portraying motherhood as the only real option for womanly fulfillment.
  4. People offering hot tips on how it really is possible to get pregnant, how they/their mate/some random stranger overcame infertility.
  5. Family lamenting a lack of grandchildren/nieces/nephews/cousins and having nothing to give them.
  6. Almost every friend you ever had popping out kids and posting about it on all the social media platforms they can access with absolutely no consideration of how phenomenally privileged they were to have sex and get a free bonus baby.

After all this. After all the shit infertile people have to go through… WE DON’T EVEN GET TO HAVE A PARTY THAT’S JUST IN HONOUR OF US!?!?!?



How is that fair?

Pregnant women get showered with gifts and attention and paid maternity leave and those poor fucks who have spent their life savings on some useless fertility treatment bullshit get nothing? Nothing? Nothing.

(We’re especially precluded from one of those screaming, shitting, drooling booby prizes.)

So, I say, bring on infertility showers as the new awkward 21st century trend. Bring me gifts of wine and beer and lovely grown up pretty things that children would destroy. Bring me potting mix and pot brownies. Bring me tens of thousands of dollars in cash and I’ll put it towards recouping the money I spent on infertility.

We’ll eat unpasteurised dairy products, unwashed salad, we’ll gorge ourselves on grog from bottles infused with BPAs and we’ll have an bloody excellent, child-free time.

Who’s with me?