IVF Is Messy, And No One Prepared You for That.
You're not dramatic. You're not failing. You're human in something no one prepared you for.
By Pamala, Founder of Solacove | From lived experience, not a clinical perspective.
If you’re smack in the middle of IVF right now, you don’t need anyone to tell you how it feels. It’s not tidy. It’s not peaceful. It’s not a simple checklist of appointments and dates. It seeps into everything: your mind, your relationships, the deepest sense of who you are. You’ve probably found yourself lying awake at 2am, thinking, Why am I so angry lately? Is it normal to just feel numb after the transfer? How am I supposed to survive this two-week wait without losing my mind? These aren’t hypothetical worries. This is what survival looks like.
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The science of IVF is advanced. The emotional support around it is not. About 1 in 8 couples in the United States struggle with infertility, and each year, over 300,000 IVF cycles are started in this country alone. Globally, the number of people navigating IVF reaches into the millions. This is not rare. This is not fringe. And yet the emotional experience of infertility still feels like something you are supposed to manage quietly.
IVF is presented as a medical process. It is rarely presented as an identity shift. No one tells you that you might not recognize yourself during this process. That hormones can sharpen anxiety and irritability until you feel like you are living inside someone else's nervous system. No one tells you that after your third failed transfer, you might feel nothing. Not devastation. Not tears. Just numbness. And that the numbness can feel scarier than the grief. No one tells you that IVF can make you resent your own body. That after months or years of trying, you may stop trusting it. You may start talking about it as if it were separate from you. Like it betrayed you.
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And before anyone who hasn't sat in a fertility clinic says, "Well, you didn't have to do IVF," let's be clear: people do not arrive here casually. IVF is not something you try for fun. It is something you turn to after unexplained fertility, loss, waiting, or doors quietly closing. The grief that led someone to make that decision in the first place is erased when it is reduced to a simple decision. Nobody owes the world an explanation of how they create their family.
Cycle, retrieval, embryo quality, and implantation window- those words make sense in a clinic. Behind closed doors, it’s messier. Why is my body so unpredictable? How much more of this can I actually take? How am I supposed to show up at work like nothing’s happening? Living in constant uncertainty changes you. It wears down your nerves. Suddenly, the small stuff is huge, and the big stuff feels impossible.
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IVF is more than needles and blood draws. It’s money worries that sneak into your relationship. It’s intimacy that turns into a calendar event. When you barely have enough hope left for yourself, you have to manage everyone else’s hope, too. You skip baby showers. Then you feel guilty about skipping baby showers. Hope starts to feel dangerous. At some point, you stop picturing a positive test. You brace yourself. You numb out. Don’t get excited, you think. Not this time. That’s not being negative. That’s just trying to protect your heart from more cracks.
And then there is the two-week wait. The symptom spotting. The Googling. Analyzing every cramp. Testing too early. Knowing it's too early. Doing it anyway. The quiet spiral that happens while the rest of the world keeps moving. Because it affects every aspect of your life, your body, your relationship, your finances, your friendships, your sense of control, and your identity, IVF is messy.
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Most support still orbits clinical milestones, not because clinics fall short, but because what's missing is space to say 'I'm jealous. I'm angry. I'm exhausted. I'm scared to hope. I don't recognize myself, and I am held there, no corrections, no positivity mandates, no rush to the next cycle.
If you’re somewhere in the middle of IVF and you feel messy, reactive, numb, overwhelmed, all of it, you’re not screwing this up. Honestly, it’s the most normal way to handle something completely abnormal. Your mind and body are just trying to get you through. That’s survival, not failure. IVF might be medicine, but it still happens in a real, messy, tired human body. Nobody processes longing, uncertainty, hormones, money stress, and hope on repeat in a neat way. We process it messily. Even if your emotions are all over the place, that’s resilience in the raw, your system adapting, fighting for you, not against you. There’s nothing broken about that. It’s just how you keep going, one day at a time.
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Some days you’re on edge, some days you’re just numb. Hopeful in the morning, shut down by night. You keep it together in public, then fall apart the second you’re alone. None of this means you’re failing. It means you’re carrying a load you never imagined, infertility, IVF, this whole road nobody tells you about, while the world assumes you’ll just have a baby when you feel like it.
If IVF feels messy, that does not make you dramatic. It does not make you ungrateful. It does not mean you are doing it wrong. It means you are human in the middle of something that asks a lot of you. And you are allowed to be in the middle of it without having it all tied up.
If you need a next step, let it be small. Text one friend the word "messy" today. You don’t have to explain. Just share the truth that this is hard. Sometimes, reaching out in a tiny, imperfect way is the most powerful thing you can do for yourself right now.
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