Fertile Yoga

Since the end of June I have been attending fertile yoga classes that are offered at my RE office. The instructor of the class is wonderful and I try to attend as many as I can. They are usually every Saturday morning but I have missed the past three weeks, the first two because there was no class and last week because we were at the Renaissance Faire. The yoga class is so much more than yoga. In fact, the first half hour is a discussion/support group and then the following hour is a time for relaxation, a time to focus on myself and to feel how I feel, to strech and to move my body. Most of the time I feel like my body is and has been working against me. I mean there is obviously something wrong if I cannot get pregnant - it is what a woman's body is designed to do and mine cannot. The time at class is a time where I can feel good about my body and what it can do.

It is also so helpful to be able to talk with other women who are going through some of the same stuff as me right now. Infertility is hard, and what makes it even harder is when people don't really understand. I have lots of well-intentioned family and friends whom I am very thankful for but none that can really relate and that is frustrating.

What makes the class really wonderful is the instructor. She went through infertility treatments about 10 years ago (I think thats the timeline) but unfortunately never had a baby. She works at the RE office and has worked as an infertility activist and spokesperson so she really knows what she is talking about and has been through every test we have been through or will. She is able to relate to the feelings of a woman who has been hyperstimulated, a woman who has had a miscarriage, a woman taking injectibles, going through IVF, a woman (like me) who is taking Clomid for the very first time. She is just all around wonderful and another person in my life that I am very very thankful for.

The first class (they are usually very small 3-4 people max) I attended was one where it was the instructor, myself and two women who had just had miscarriages. They were both older than me (which has been the case ever since - I'm always the youngest there) and had both done IVF, one was an early miscarriage and the other was at 12 weeks. I heard their stories about the treatment and the costs of it, not only financial but emotional and physical too. The instructor was worried that after what I had heard I would not want to come back but after I left that group I felt better than I had ever before. I think that was because I had someone to listen to me who really understood what I was going through and I was able to listed to stories of women who had been through treatment. There are so many emotions you go through when you are experiencing infertitilty and its treatments that I have found it so helpful to be able to focus on them instead of trying to hide them or pretend they don't exist.

Since the first class I have been to as many as I could and I am seriously missing it sine I haven't been there in three weeks. I wonder if the woman who was having her egg retrieval the day after the last class I was in got pregnant. I wonder how others treatments are going and I am looking forward to sharing what has been going on with me the last three weeks. Now that I am done with the Clomid (and had absolutely no side effects btw) I am scheduled to go in to the RE office on Saturday morning at 7:30 to get my injection. Then I will wait until 9:30 and head next door to the other part of the office where we do the Yoga. I hope I will have good news to share. I hope that I will be able to say that everything looks as it should and that my IUI is scheduled for Monday.