Managing the Stress of Infertility While You're on Vacation by Lee Trask/Infertility Blogger: at DailyStrength Doctors and Advisors

Lee Trask is an advocate for women dealing with issues of infertility and miscarriage. Having struggled through more than six years of infertility, three miscarriages, and high-risk pregnancy, she is now happy raising her two…

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Managing the Stress of Infertility While You're on Vacation

Posted in Infertility by Lee Trask on Jul 21, 2011

Most of you are probably taking a little vacation this summer... whether it’s a full blown trip with your extended family (we take a week at the beach with the kid’s grandparents every August), or a stay-cation in your own area with just you and your partner. One of the things that can really take the relaxation out of a vacation is the stress of infertility. So, for the time you are taking a break from your every day normal lives, you might consider taking a break from trying to conceive.

The goal of a vacation is to put work, emails, deadlines, phone calls and all that requires your attention on the back burner. Do the same with your infertility. Forget it. Make an agreement with your partner that it is off limits for the time of your vacation. Forget it for one week (or what ever amount of time you are taking off).

Enjoy your time together without mention of babies. Drink a bottle of wine (or 2!) together, have sex when you feel like it (not when the calendar says you have to), talk about little things, not big important heavy pressure things. If you are able to take a week or so off from charts and doctor’s visits and lab work and OPKs, it can be quite refreshing psychologically, and allows you to nurture your relationship with your partner, which can really take a beating during the stress of infertility.

You can even use the entire summer as a time to re-evaluate where you are in your journey. What your plan is for the next year, the next two years, the next five? Take a look at what is working and what isn’t, and research some other ideas if what you have been doing isn’t giving you the results you’d hoped it would. Is there another step you can take (maybe you’ve been putting off IVF), or maybe you’ve done a few cycles of IVF unsuccessfully, and you are ready to consider fostering a child, or even adopting.

The summer months seem to slow time down a bit, and you can use that change of pace to relax and take some pressure off of yourself and your journey.

- Lee Trask