IVF Pregnancy – Letting the world know

Congratulations.  You survived the needles.  You survived the doctors.  You finally got the positive results from the doctor on the pregnancy test.  You are going to have an IVF baby.
Should you go tell the world?

Yes.  Maybe.  Eventually.

This is a very personal subject.  Beagoodmom and I discussed this for a long time before we started the IVF process for Geetle and Pookie.

Let’s go through the options of when you can tell and see what the pros and cons are of each.

• As soon as you get started.  You can tell people that you are trying as soon as you get referred to your fertility specialist.
• Pro – Going through fertility treatment is a very emotionally draining experience.  Getting support from the beginning could be very beneficial.
• Con – Everytime you see the people that know, you will have to talk about how the fertility treatments are going.  When you are going through your fourth embryo transfer and you know that if this one does not work, you will have to go through the egg retrieval again, you may not be prepared to answer these well-intentioned questions.
• Before heartbeat.  After passing the pregnancy test, the fertility doctor will continue to monitor you until they hear the baby’s heartbeat at about week 6-8.
• Pro – You can finally tell everybody about all that you have been through.
• Con – If you are going to miscarry, it is probably going to be during this phase.  Everybody you tell is somebody you have to untell if something goes wrong.
• After heartbeat.  After they hear the heartbeat, you are released to your normal doctor for the rest of the pregnancy.  It really starts to feel real during this phase.
• Pro – People will start to wonder why you are so happy/moody/crazy/sick depending on how the early stages of pregnancy affect you.  If you tell now, people won’t worry about you if you get a little wacky.
• Con – You are still early in the pregnancy.  Most miscarriages happen in the first trimester.  Telling as soon as you hear the heartbeat leaves you with the risk of needing to untell if there is a problem.
• 3 months.  The traditional time to announce.
• Pro – You get some extra time to enjoy the new growing baby with your spouse.  Just your little secret.  Everytime he rubs your belly in public, you’ll know, but nobody else will.  Also, you don’t have to worry about somebody from work finding out and having to figure out how they will react.
• Con – If you are having multiples, you will probably start showing before 3 months are up.  People will begin to wonder why you are putting on the extra weight so quickly if you don’t fill them in.  Another con is it really sucks to wait from day 1 of the transfer for a whole 3 months.  Most people don’t know they are pregnant until much later and waiting until the end of the first trimester isn’t nearly as big of a wait.

We waited until about two months.  We wanted the one month of just us knowing, but we wanted everybody to know before they guessed because of the early belly bulge you get with twins.

If we go through it again, we will probably tell immediate family.  Mostly because we will need somebody to watch the kids while we make trips to the fertility doctor.  People would probably figure it out if we kept making strange trips to the doctor.
The other big question at this point is how to tell.  My two favorite tellings where when we told my parents and my sister.

For my parents, my dad had just received our Iowa Hawkeye football season tickets.  We have now had those tickets for around 18 years.  We were all standing in the kitchen and I asked if I could see them.  With everybody there, I counted the tickets and said, “It looks like we’re going to need to order more tickets soon.”

They asked “Why?”

“Because we’re pregnant.”

Everybody danced and hugged and cried.  Then when everybody calmed down, I said something like, “So how much will two more tickets cost?”

I think they asked something about if Beagoodmom was planning to start coming to the games.

“Oh no,” I replied, “but I’ll want to bring the twins together eventually.”

Then more dancing, hugging and crying.

We saw my sister later that day out of town in the parking lot before a cousin’s wedding.  My sister was in nursing school at the time and I was taking an Anatomy and Physiology test.  I gave her the ultrasound photo and told her I could get some extra credit for identifying exactly what it was.

She looked at it a while and said, “It’s an early ultrasound of a very young baby.”

I said, “Yeah, but I think there’s something more than that.”

She looked at it again and said that she didn’t notice anything.

I said, “I’m not sure, but I think it might be special because they are our twins.”

More dancing, hugging, and crying.

Coming up next: Does the Pope really hate me?
If you want to see the table of contents for this series, it is here.

Related posts:

1. IVF – Waiting for the pregnancy test
2. Two things all dad’s should do before the baby is born
3. Pregnancy Nutrition
4. Just how many babies am I going to have anyway?
5. Infertility Series Announcement