RESOLVE is proud to launch its first online personal assessment tool for women and men who are unsure if they should see a fertility specialist, called Fertility 5.

Do you have 5 rules to live by when it comes to infertility?  Here are my 5 tips for your fertility journey:

1. Don’t compare your journey to anyone else’s.

I know, it’s hard.  I do it myself.  I look around and see everyone I ‘started with’, with babies, with toddlers, or pregnant for the second or third time.  Like ‘they’ always say, ‘these things take time’, but there’s no hard and fast rules.  For many people, it’s the simple question of timing, for some people they get pregnant as quickly as they decide to start trying.  For others, they try for years and eventually get pregnant naturally with seemingly no explanation as to why it took so long in the first place.

Be patient (holy crap is that ever hard!!) take big deep breaths and remember that you’re not alone – even if you feel like you’re the only one on earth who is struggling to have a baby and if you feel like it’ll never happen.  Everyone’s timeline is different, and while we are all sharing a common experience, everyone’s experience will be different.

2. Don’t close any doors.

I know some people who brace themselves and run in to this process with a very definite finish line in mind.

‘I won’t go past this stage…’

‘I’ll stop when…’

‘I won’t do that…’

Please keep an open mind, take each stage and hurdle, independently, and give it due consideration.  How you feel from the outset of your journey and how you feel during different phases of your journey, are often very different – don’t rule anything out.  At least until you’ve given it some serious thought.

3. Research and plan.

In the same breath as telling you not to close any doors, I’m also telling you to plan.  I know, it sounds almost like I’m countermanding my own advice but having a rough idea of what is potentially in your future is never a bad thing – especially for someone like me, who is, most definitely, a list person.

Those of you trying to conceive (TTC) should be taking pre-natal vitamins, many of you will be checking your basal temperature, tracking your cycle (I have an app on my iPhone for that), peeing on ovulation prediction kits (OPK’s), using special pH balancing lubricant, dangling upside down from your bed, sleeping with your legs in the air and all kinds of weird and wonderful things to try and get pregnant, there’s a lot of balls in the air.

Do your research, make a list and plan, whether it’s a list of all of the potential next steps, or if it’s just one step at a time – it helps to have something to check off.

The rough and general progression of the process (which I wish someone had told me before I started) that people tend to follow is this: ‘try’ independently for six months, visit with an OBGYN, have an ultrasound, get bloodwork done, undergo an HSG , go see a reproductive endocrinologist, take clomid (fertility drug), undergo a laparoscopy, IUI, IVF – but again, I refer you to step #1 – don’t compare your journey to anyone else’s.

4. Listen to everyone, about everything, but try not to take it all in.

Everyone’s got an opinion, a plethora of advice to offer, war stories, battle scars, third party stories,

‘I heard that you should try this…’

‘This worked for my friend…’

The list of old wives tales is pretty long, you’ll have any number of people telling you to ‘relax’ and ‘just enjoy the trying’, you’ll get very good at nodding and smiling, grinning through gritted teeth.

Be a sponge, absorb all the information around you, being educated is a great tool.  Take it home, process it and just use what you need – you and you alone will know what that is.  You won’t need everything you hear or learn, again see #1, everyone’s journey is different!

5. Talk it out.

Don’t suffer in silence, don’t go through this alone.  It’s not easy.  None of it, trying for a baby, failing to produce a baby, the emotional quagmire surrounding fertility – it’s a pretty tough assault course and there’s plenty of people out there going through a similar experience.

Read blogs, read articles, get in contact with a RESOLVE support group (wanna know why? Check out Betsy Campbell at Resolve and her 5 reasons to join a support group, here), heck, even start a blog, or a support group – whatever it takes to help you deal.  There’s a captive audience out there – use it!

Do you think you might be suffering from infertility? Check out RESOLVE’s personal assessment tool, Fertility 5, here.

Do you have tips for people embarking on a fertility journey? Share them in the comments below…