Good day to you internet! Well here we are again for a third post in one week on my infertility blog, I think that may be some sort of record for one of my blogs this year like I said I was feeling motivated by my discovery of the fact that next week is National Infertility Awareness Week. I thought I would mention it again there since that is the general purpose of my blog and putting a subject that has effected me personally and sharing our experiences in the hope that it will help even one person out there.

OK let me get down to direction of this post and that is based on the title of course coping with the stress caused by infertility. First off if you are not experiencing fertility problems yourself first hand then I mean no disrespect but you really have no idea how dealing with this problem would feel. There are a lot of things that come up when you realize that there is a problem with your ability as a human being to pro create your own species. That’s just on the most basic level then you have that desire to have a family of your own the need to ‘continue’ your family tree or bloodline if you will.

There are a lot of hopes and dreams that get squashed rather harshly when you come to the realization that for some reason unknown to you that you or your partner is infertile. This is a disease that has destroyed many a marriage or even a potential relationship just because of one persons ability or inability to be fertile.

Enough about the down side as I think I made it pretty clear how devastating the disease of infertility can be. What are some of the best things that a person or couple can do to better manage the stress that infertility can cause? The number one thing that I will recommend to anyone dealing with this stuff would be to join a small group. You can find them on the internet  or through your doctors office or even through your churches.

When we started our fight with infertility the first few month were incredibly stressful and hard on us. Looking back now I can say that we made it a lot harder on ourselves by keeping all the infertility issues to ourselves which made us feel very isolated and alone with this problem and that was a big mistake on our part. Then my wife reached out to a few infertility forums and made some really good online connections with couples that were going through a lot of the same experiences as we were and just knowing that we were not alone in our fight was a big boost in our resolve to keep going.

Another coping technique that we learned to do through this whole process which I will admit had to be learned because we were not very good at it in the beginning. For couples especially the man is only going to ‘feel’ the stress of infertility when they are either at the doctors office or in the bedroom other than that we are just going push it off into a compartment somewhere so we can not think about it. For the female of course you know where I am going with this they are going to ‘feel’ that stress all night and all day. Excepting those facts is the hard part when an issue that is so important to both of you is in the mix. My wife could not understand how I could put it aside for a while where as I could not get a handle on why she focused so much on it. It is a difficult line to walk  but recognizing and excepting that men and women are just wired to handle issues like infertility differently and when you learn to except that fact your will find that it will go a long way towards managing that stress a little bit easier.

Now I will keep this simple and stop right there with the coping tips because as I look back on the last 10 years if I could pick out two things that made the biggest impact in helping us deal with the stress of infertility as a couple I would tell you the two I just listed. So if you are a new IF fighter and you have not done either of those two steps then get out there and find a group and learn to except your partners way of dealing with the situation and keep moving forward. That’s it for now internet I hope if you managed to read all the way to the end of my post here that you got something out of it, remember keep fighting and don’t let IF win!