I try to make it a habit not to talk about religion, politics or money – I guess I am in a rule breaking mood though because here I am about to discuss two of the three! As I have mentioned before, when we began our infertility journey we were pretty open and often talked about our struggles and different treatments that we were pursuing, and that included sharing with co-workers and my supervisor. The early treatments did not require that much time away from work and my tales of fertility woes were more anecdotal than anything. As time went on, however, treatments, and appointments, and monitoring, and surgical procedures, and the like began to demand more of my time and it became necessary to tell my boss more out of necessity for time away from the office than to share stories.
By the time we got to my IVF cycle my boss pretty much knew all that was going on because I had to request so much time off. I tried to schedule early morning or late afternoon appointments whenever possible, but there is so much that has to be done according to your body’s schedule or the office schedule that it is virtually impossible to totally work around a full-time job (or at least it is at my clinic). Then of course, there is also the issue that not only is your time being consumed, but also all of your thoughts and worries and concerns that are now centered on treatment and its outcome. Working to take your mind off of all that is going on works for a lot of people – it didn’t for me. At my full-time job I use a computer daily and for a large majority of my time at work. Easy access to an internet full of information made it impossible for me to resist doing all the research I could on fertility treatment and success rates, and I spent a lot of time seeking out others going through the same things.
This, of course, was the very last thing I should have been doing when my job was crucial to IVF. With no insurance coverage for fertility treatments, health insurance for me and my spouse through my employer, a serious financial undertaking (IVF) that would require my salary contribution to keep the family afloat, and a supportive boss who was willing to be flexible and understanding, the last thing I should have been doing was in any way jeopardizing my job. When in the midst of fertility treatments, though, working full-time is tough. I truly don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t been able to tell my boss what I was going through to enable him to understand why I was suddenly using sick days when I never had before, and often seemed unusually distracted, scared and worried. There are so many issues that arise with infertility and its treatment – it is unfortunate that balancing work and efforts to create a family is just one additional, very difficult challenge to most people.
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