Infertility: How Open Are You?
We’re really pleased to have Juliet Le Page write another guest blog for us.
Hello again. I am Juliet Le Page working as a fertility awareness practitioner in Edinburgh with a further qualification under my belt! Fertility UK (www.fertilityuk.org) is the national fertility awareness and natural family planning service for the United Kingdom. Run by Jane Knight (Specialist Fertility Nurse Counsellor, Fertility UK) and Dr Cecilia Pyper (Primary Care Consultant and Associate Public Health Action Support Team (PHAST)) they are at the very top of their relative professions when it comes to all things related to female reproductive health.The new qualification means being able to teach the sympto-thermal method of fertility awareness as well as the Billings Ovulation Method and in Scotland there are only three of us practitioners being able to provide this service so I feel in exalted company!
For this blog though I wanted to ask you as you read this how able are you to talk about your fertility issues? What gets in the way of being able to openly talk about what you have been going through, asking for help, saying how it is making you feel?From my experience, both working as a practitioner and personally, most couples and individuals find that they are in an isolating and isolated world with only on-line help or their partner to talk to and even the latter I have known too often to be part of the issue.
Difficulty conceiving, pregnancy loss, secondary infertility, the list goes on, can be devastating, and it’s time we openly acknowledged that. So why do we all find it so hard to openly talk about our problems?
Talking About Trying
I am going to make a plug here for INUK (Infertility Network UK) ‘Talking about Trying’ campaign.
This particular campaign, that INUK is running, aims to bring infertility out of the closet and get lots of people talking more openly about it. And it’s very empowering. By speaking out, telling others your story and sharing your experiences, you will empower others to do the same and help to raise much more awareness of the pain of infertility or any other conception problem.
In America there is a similar campaign that apparently is working brilliantly! Get behind the INUK campaign or start one in your own country and spread the word and help us get more people Talking about Trying!
So, you may want to know, what are you doing about it Juliet? Well if you Google my name you will see I have been interviewed many times for various newspapers, spoken on the Radio and appeared on television talking mostly about egg donation but also other forms of assisted conception as well. And I know how difficult this is to do as I am not comfortable being in front of the camera so to speak. But I do believe that I have a duty to our two children to prove that there is a good reason to be open and honest about the problems we had conceiving otherwise what sort of example am I setting them and, for that matter, all of you out there!
So let’s end the isolation and secrecy of infertility or any of the problems you have had conceiving/keeping hold of a pregnancy and get talking about them.
