The Vine: March 4, 2011
Submitted by Sarah D. Bunting on March 4, 2011 – 8:15 AM38 Comments
A really quick Ask The Readers query — can any members of the glorious Nation point me in the direction of any useful infertility forums? Hubs and I are really going through the mill at the moment and the future isn’t looking particularly optimistic, and I’d like to find an online community that isn’t covered in trackers and emoticons and unicorns and butterflies! Just somewhere with intelligent posters who can give useful support, without squeeing and LOL-ing every other sentence. I’m in the UK, but this is such a universal problem, I don’t think the location of the forum makes a huge difference.
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Eggs, have you tried Craigslist’s forums? There is a “trying to conceive” forum on their main listings, and from there a link to an “advanced” TTC forum for women undergoing fertility treatments. It’s not the fastest-paced forum, but there is a lot of useful information to be found, along with helpful posters.
It’s an international forum, although most of the people are from all over the US, but your location shouldn’t matter. You probably won’t be able to get recommendations for doctors, but plenty of advice regarding treatments, procedures, medications, etc.
Best of luck to you and your husband.
It isn’t a forum, but the website A Little Pregnant (www.alittlepregnant.com) is a wonderful resource. If you start at the beginning (2003? I think?) you can follow the writer’s journey to have her first child (born very premature) and her second (eventually using donor eggs) and all the ups-downs-all-arounds that she and her husband experienced. There’s a lot of cursing, references to vodka, and when she isn’t making you cry you’ll wet your pants laughing. It’s a good site.
It’s not a forum per se, but Stirrup Queens is a great infertility blog community resource.
Some of the TTC forums have “IVF Veterans” boards, which tend to be relatively babydust-free.
See if The Mommies Network (www.themommiesnetwork.org) has a forum for your city (for example, mine is TriangleMommies here in the triangle area of NC). It’s a twee name, but a very helpful resource. Your local TMN forum will have a private Infertility forum for people in your area going though this. If you live in a larger area the forum will be more active, though.
I apologize, I somehow missed that you were in the UK.
I’m sorry you’re having to look for this – I’m in a similar boat, and it sucks in all directions. The forums on the Taking Charge of Your Fertility (tcoyf.com) are very good. Even better are the buddy groups, which are small groups of women going through similar things (ie IUIs, IVFs, IVF after losses, etc)
FertilityFriend.com has an excellent community of women with infertility issues. It’s probably the best site of its kind that I have seen, and I am also a member. I believe you can access the message boards with the free registration, but there is also a VIP membership available that gives you access to other conception tools on the website. The message boards are well-organized, and the members are all very intelligent, supportive and respectful. Most of the posters are US, but there are a lot of women from Canada, UK and Australia that contribute as well.
Booooy do I wish I’d thought to ask this question. My husband and I finally succeeded (5 months ago today, in fact) with IVF, but for the 5 years it took I was looking for online information, support and advice. Like Eggs, what I found instead were forums littered with rainbows, silly calendar tickers, goofy emoticons, magic babydust and general barfyness. It’s a bit like the forums are all run by 13-year-old girls.
So, I have nothing useful to contribute, really, other than to let Eggs know I feel her pain and, as twee as it sounds, to say I’m proof that sometimes when you’re just about to make the decision to quit (like we were)…the miracle happens. Hang in there. I send my best wishes, and they’re sparkledust-and-unicorn-free!
Hi Eggs – just went through the whole thing myself, and I totally second “A little bit pregnant” above. There are links there to other blogs. Every forum I went to was, like you said, full of wild signatures and emoticons and stuff, and I didn’t care for it either. I did find this site that had some good tips.
You might find support among friends, believe it or not. I was surprised at how many people around me dealt with infertility.
Also, I would recommend trying alternative medicine – just to give yourself added support. I don’t necessarily believe in acupuncture, but my acupuncturist was one of the most knowledgeable people about fertility I’ve met who wasn’t a PhD, and just having that added support in my life made the process better.
Good luck!
The Secret Society of Women http://www.secretsocietyofwomen.com has some really good forums on infertility, as well as an abundance of other topics. I highly recommend it – my experience is with the forum on miscarriages (b/c I recently had one), but overall, I’ve found the discussions to be fairly intelligent and constructive. Hope this helps.
Definitely check out the altdotlife forums at http://www.altdotlife.com. They have an active infertility discussion board which I know to be well-informed and supportive. A friend of mine who struggled with infertility found it a wonderful resource.
You have to join before you can read the posts, but it only takes a minute.
Seconding the recs for Julie’s blog, A Little Pregnant, and Stirrup Queens. How I wish I’d known about these when I was going through this!
Best of luck to you, Eggs.
I have to share the bad news that I never found a message board/forum that was useful as a whole. What helped me was to reach out to individuals — either bloggers I liked or people on forums who could spell and with whom I seemed sympatico, and whose profiles did feature blinking angels crying sparkly tears.
Blog comment sections are great places to find these folks. I had to tailor-make my own community via email this way. It is tremendously helpful to lean on people going through it at the same time you are. I also HIGHLY recommend an in-person support group. I thought it would be cheesy, and it was, kind of — but it was also the most cleansing time of my whole IF journey (six years).
The whole ordeal is such a mental, physical and emotional rollercoaster and I truly and sincerely wish you all the best. (Our rollercoaster ended with an adoption, by the way, and we could not be happier.)
I 2nd Deanna’s suggestion for a little pregnant. There’s also a website called pregosaur.com – it’s pretty cheesy and not a forum but i know some of the writers are international. Best of luck on your journey.
The TCOYF forums aren’t bad, and if you’re willing to pay a little for intelligent conversation, Salon’s Table Talk forums are really good. The family & TTC threads contain many infertility veterans and there’s a lot of knowledge and experience and support for all sorts of issues. And the forums are old school, so no avatars or sig files or emoticons or sparkles or babydust anywhere.
RESOLVE: The National Infertility Organization has online support communities. http://www.resolve.org/resources/online-support-communities.html I haven’t been on these forums, but I would think that you would be able to find more support and less of the silliness that you run across on many pregnancy and baby related forums. Best of luck to you on your journey from one who has been on it before.
I second the Taking Charge of your Fertility website and also highly recommend the book.
Also, you may want to ask this question on the board below. It is an anonymous, unmoderated board and the other forums can get very, very mean and nasty. Don’t go there, just stick to the trying to conceive forum. I bet the people there will have some good suggestions and they are generally supportive.
http://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/forums/show/27.page
I wish you and your husband the best of luck.
And Sars, I just want to say that I never fully appreciated the TWOP forums until I went to the unmoderated, anonymous craziness that are the other forums on that website. You all did an incredible job. Thank you for making it so.
I just want to say A Little Pregnant is great. I read from the beginning and was just engrossed. I also read Here Be Hippogriffs who is on the A Little Pregnant blogroll. HBH is about a woman trying to conceive after having 11 miscarriages. Again, I started from the beginning and couldn’t stop reading.
I wish you the best of luck on your journey!
Yeah, totally alittlepregnant.
Check the archives and start at the beginning.
A lot of the IF community is full of sparkly crap and (I shit you not) “baby dust,” but Julie isn’t, thank God.
I wish i’d thought to ask this question 5 years ago! I joined the Fertility Friends forum and they were ok– at the time I really needed the support, so I could tolerate a fair amount of all the awful acronyms and terminology (“baby dancing”–just shoot me now).
I know this isn’t what you were asking, but I did want to recommend Alice Domar’s book Conquering Infertility. It addresses the incredible emotional and mental stress that infertility puts onto a person, especially women. It gave me some useful strategies for coping and above all made me feel not so alone. I later recommended it to a friend going through this and she said it helped her a great deal too.
After 3 rounds of IVF, I now have two wonderful sons. My sister adopted two terrific boys after doing IUIs. All to say, you will find your way to your family, even though it seems like a long long journey now. All my very best wishes to you.
I second (third? fourth?) A Little Pregnant, and a similar site that author recommended, Flotsam (http://flotsamblog.com/).
@Tashi: You’re very welcome; thanks for appreciating us.
I have nothing to add beyond what others have already mentioned, but wanted to wish you all the best, Eggs.
Thanks for posting this question. These resources are very helpful to me right now. I am getting tired of reading boards with impenetrable acronyms and horrible signatures. I also find it tough to slog through really detailed stats and measurements. I’m certainly not new to this struggle but I don’t know all the terms well enough to empathize with just numbers and letters.
I’ll be checking out some of these recommendations!
Another vote for A Little Pregnant–Julie is a fantastic writer, and I spent an entire summer riveted to the archives.
Eggs,
I wish I’d had a forumns 8-10 years ago when we were dealing with this. (4 years IVF, 3 miscarriages, one lovely son) What I did end up in was the “IVF/High risk Pregnancy support group” at my Hospital. I didn’t think I’d like it at all, but damn, those women understood me better than anyone. still good friends with one of them.
I’m a big believer in privacy and confidentiality but the support groups at the hospital were awesome. I also found an individual therapist who had been an IVF nurse (as well as an IVF patient) & just having someone completely confidential to talk to who knew all about what I was going through was extremely helpful. I think RESOLVE keeps referral lists.
Good Luck & take good care of yourself.
Like Al Lowe, I never really found a perfect solution during my four-year, multiple-procedure dealings with infertility. I had friends and family who were supportive, but they had no firsthand experience with infertility, so didn’t really get it. And I participated in a few of the forums already mentioned sporadically, but none really clicked. I did reach out to a few individuals but I was keeping things quiet — now I wish I had been more open about it, if only so my experience could help other people. I used to joke that by the end, I could probably run a fertility clinic with everything I had learned.
What did work for me the most was finding blogs (via the aforementioned Stirrup Queens mostly) that had the same specific infertility issues I had and reading through them. Whether they ultimately succeeded in welcoming a child (or children) into the family, just reading someone else’s feelings during the process, and knowing, “Okay, I’m not crazy to feel this way” (or no crazier than anyone else) helped. That, and realizing that trying to have a baby kind of makes everyone crazy. Looking back now, I was pretty nutso there for a while. I’m mostly better now.
seconding the forums at altdotlife.com. It’s a refreshingly unicorn and baby-dust free zone, and the women there are by and large sane, educated, well-informed, and supportive. I will note that while there is an large section devoted to fertility struggles, there are also extensive areas for pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing–just letting you know in case you just don’t want to deal with all that stuff right now. (Although you can block forums you don’t want to see–I blocked all the pregnancy forums after a miscarriage and then when I actually got pregnant I forgot that I’d done it and couldn’t find anything.).
Oh, and nthing the marvelous A Little Pregnant.
Word on the presh and twee forums out there. All that sugar and saccharin drove me crazy–I too gave up before finding an online support network. But I’m really posting to second the recommendation for acupuncture. My fertility specialist highly recommends it and my acupuncturist has a very high success rate with her TTC patients, no matter what route they are trying.
Best wishes, Eggs, for success and for sanity at this difficult time!
Oh @egg, I’m sorry to hear about your troubles. Best wishes going forward. I have nothing to add except so much word on pregnancy forums. They look like a unicorn vomited on a fairy.
The TWOP boards truly ruined me for other forums. As well as the the excellent moderation, the lack of sig files and other flashy things were terrific.
I’ve been going through the ringer myself for the past year. I too found The Stirrup Queens (www.stirrup-queens.com) a great resource to find the blogs of others in similar specific circumstances. For forums, I did like one with an excess of sticky dust, because I found its buddy boards potentially useful and comforting to read. forums.fertilitycommunity.com. They have threads for “women doing IVF in March” (or FET or what have you). Depending on the group, there’s a lot of squeeing and abominably poor “medical” opinions, but also much to learn just from hearing what protocols others are on. I found it gave me some human perspective on the statistics, watching a group of 30 or 40 women go through a similar procedure. But the value of the thread depends enormously on the particular group of participants. Of the three buddy boards I followed closely during my three procedures in the past year, one was very informative and supportive and still continues over a year later. The other two, well, not so much. For no squeeing, ivfconnections.com is good. Unfortunately, it’s a re-start of what used to be a very active community and from what I can tell doesn’t have the same participation it used to (and doesn’t have access to the old archives), but still some very knowledgeable participants.
Hang in there!
First of all, thank you for posting this, Sars. I’m just starting the whole treatment process with infertility and many of the sites that people have mentioned here I haven’t visited before. So I don’t have any new recommendations, Eggs, but I just wanted to say I’m sorry you’re going through it, too. Infertility sucks and inspires a special kind of crazy in many women (including myself), so having some sort of outlet is so helpful. I have a group of online friends (mainly women who I “met” through a TWoP board years ago) and while none of them are currently trying to conceive or dealing with infertility, I have started a private blog about my whole experience with treatment that they can read. Just having a place to write about what I’m going through helps and they’ve all been so lovely and supportive. Plus, since many of them don’t have children yet but plan on having them in the future, I feel like my story might help some of them (although I would prefer none of them have to struggle with infertility). At the very least, it’s another outlet/form of support.
Yes, yes, yes to both A Little Pregnant and the Stirrup Queen’s blogroll. SQ has divided up the blogroll into all kinds of categories, so if you want to only read people who have kids, don’t have kids, who have lost kids, who have adopted, who have stopped trying – it’s all there. I will also recommend Julia at Uncommon Misconception and Soper at Uterine Wars.
Funny, I started reading many of these ladies before I even started trying to have kids. I stayed because they were so sharp and funny and no-BS, even though I sometimes felt I had no right, like I was a voyeur. Many years, a few horror stories, and one kid later and I can tell you that they definitely saved my sanity sometimes, if not my life. Their experiences made me a more informed patient in a lot of cases. And when my son was born at 26 weeks, I knew I could go back to Julie’s archives; the familiarity of her experience to what I was dealing with, the frustrations and dark humor she found, and the glimpse ahead for what to expect, was just such a gift.
And, off the suggestion train – you are not alone. There are so many of us out there, and every damn one of us feels so alone sometimes, so I thought it was important to say.
I’m another one who has been through the wringer. We tried for five years, using pretty much every technology possible (many times) before becoming pregnant 9 weeks ago. I also found that the message boards are too much unicorn-pony-rainbow love for me. I usually ended up just googling whatever info I was looking for and viewing a variety of sites. I, like others, never really found an all-encompassing great site. I began blogging my own experiences, not so much to gain support (though a little of that), but to chronicle and stress-relieve. You are welcome to check it out: http://kep423.wordpress.com/, and I’d be happy to communicate specifically about any of your/my experiences, or questions that you have. I really wish that there were more intelligent forums for support, but it seems like infertility is still a taboo/private conversation for many people. I wish you the very best of luck.
Hi all, Eggs here. Thank you so much everyone for all your suggestions, ideas and general support. Haven’t had a chance to check everything yet, although i’d already come across the wonderful a little pregnant. Hubs and I are in a holding pattern at the moment, waiting for our first specialist fertility clinic appointment, but trying to just live our lives and not go into stasis until something happens!
All hail the mighty and gorgeous nation
My husband and I have also been through so much over the past two and a half years, and I’ve found a couple of great resources, most of which have already been mentioned so I’m only posting to add one more: Twitter.
I created a Twitter account using a screenname I’d never used before and searched for infertility terms like IVF (we’ve done two now, both unsuccessful), IUI, and even the names of some of the drugs I’d been prescribed. I’ve found a wonderful group of ladies this way and it’s been great to have people to celebrate and commiserate with along the way.
I know I’m a little late to answer, but I agree about Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters. I wanted to add my very favorite, saved-my-sanity while we went through everything infertility, and that is Dawn Davenport’s website, Creating a Family (http://www.creatingafamily.org/). I can’t tell you how helpful this site was to me, and in particular, the podcasts on every subject imaginable. I downloaded all the old ones, then waited for a new one each week. I listened to them daily through a lot of misery and they gave me hope, and so very much information! I learned options, but I also learned more empathy for women (and their partners) of every situation. I highly recommend it. I wish you lots of luck and peace with your journey.