Dr. Jay bought me some coffee pods yesterday and on the label they were proclaimed "Warm and nutty". While this post has NOTHING to do with coffee, I just thought it would make a great post title.
I was at the lab office today waiting to get a blood draw. I am hypothyroid and I feel things are off again. The only way to know is a full thyroid work up. Lovely. Dr Jay was getting his meds, so I waited. The only magazine? A pregnancy magazine. As I was flipping through, I found an "article", more like junk, on "how to get pregnant". As a former infertile, I read this carefully. Some of the advice was assinine to be kind:
- Stop your birth control
- Stop drinking coffee (yeah, as if your one -two cups a day really matters)
- Enjoy sex, people who enjoy sex get pregnant (BULLSHIT, my RE pointed out when we did IUIs that there is no connection between female orgasm and pregnancy)
- Most specialists won’t see you for one year, so follow our suggestions (Fuck that, my MIL’s advice when we were 8 months in was "lie, they don’t know how long you’ve been trying. What if it is something your OB can find out quickly?")
- Relax. (Again BULLSHIT! I started telling people that we tried relaxing, now stressing was what we were trying)
I know, I shouldn’t get so angry over this, but I do. There are women out there who are going through infertility and they read dreck like this and feel like they are failures. They worry if the cup of coffee they drank at Starbuck’s last week is going to screw up this month. They worry that they are stressed from timing sex and that they aren’t enjoying enough and that they can’t get pregnant if they are not enjoying it. They worry that they are worrying too much about coffee and sex to get pregnant.
We need less of this bullshit and more understanding of people struggling with infertility.
Enjoy sex…ha. There are an awful lot of people who probably aren’t enjoying it that get knocked up when they don’t necessarily want to. Little thing called biological makeup.
Oh, and I love the title of your post.
Excellent post. Main reason why I don’t read most magazines: lots of stupid fluff and no substance.
I so agree with you. Timing sex on your most fertile days when neither one of you is in the “mood”! Talk about stress!!!
Ah the drivel that passes for advice in magazines… After hiring marketing writers and seeing how we tell them exactly what to write and how to fit it to the page and work in “these exact words from our 10 sponsors” and take out these 15 phrases that might offend people, etc., etc., I know now that it’s all crap. You’re right though, I do feel sorry for anyone who believes it.