A chapter in our story of secondary infertility and parenting
IVF comes with lots of questions, heartbreaks, needle pricks, and hopefully — eventually — a few triumphs. But it also comes with calendars. For fertility patients, conflicting calendars swirl around day-in and day-out, refusing to play nice and creating chaos. For me, one of the most difficult challenges of infertility has been learning to grasp all these calendars and weave them into a workable arrangement. Through this challenge, I’ve reinforced my belief in the importance of taking adventures, even when the calendars in my life say “no”.
Let’s take these calendars one at a time. For starters, there are the typical calendars: day-to-day plans, work schedules, holidays. These calendars alone sometimes dominate my life. From there, you have the more theoretical, long-term calendars. Rough timelines of future events, like buying a new house, or moving to a new city. Growing your family. Taking your daughter to Disney World for the first time.
Finally, there’s the IVF (In Vitro Fertilization) calendar. This one is a bit more concrete. Our fertility doctor sends us literal calendar files that detail when to start and stop certain medications and injections, when to go in for ultrasounds and blood draws, and the tentative dates for the big moments during IVF: egg retrieval and embryo transfer. There’s a bit of flexibility, but, if all goes well, the schedule is mostly fixed.
The trouble is, there’s actually one more calendar at play: the overarching, unknowable calendar of the body. We all do our best to guess what this calendar might look like. Our clinic prescribes certain hormones at certain times to try and chart a course. But my body often responds in unpredictable ways. When this happens, another IVF calendar comes off the refrigerator and goes into the recycling bin, and we end up finding a way to fit the new one around the other plans we’ve carefully balanced. We’ve been doing this, again and again, for years.
Once, those calendars aligned with the stars and gave us our daughter. Subsequent pregnancy calendars and breastfeeding calendars eventually led to a new set of more abstract calendars. We started imagining all the adventures we would take with her. Her first time at the ocean, the apple orchard, the aquarium, the zoo, the science center…she was pretty young for all of these, but we had no regrets whatsoever. We had spent years daydreaming about these firsts, and we wasted no time starting to live those dreams.
For me, Disney World was among the most important adventures. Disney recurs again and again in my life, marking various milestones. It was my family’s first big road trip when I was eleven years old and one of the catalysts for my love of travel. The next year, we took a road trip with a stop at Disneyland. I returned to Florida with my high school’s music program and eventually went back as part of the Disney College Program in 2008. That year, I spent four months working long, hot shifts at ice cream carts and pretzel stands in Animal Kingdom…and I still managed to come away loving Disney. Years later, my husband and I returned for the first few days of our honeymoon. We even spent a day at Disneyland Paris in 2017.
So, it felt natural to start planning our daughter’s first trip to Disney on the early side. These plans were accelerated by another looming series of calendars. In late 2023, we started a new IVF cycle, in hopes of welcoming a new baby in 2025. This left us with a choice: Do Disney right away, in the middle of IVF, or wait until pregnancy, the newborn days, or later still. To me, it made the most sense to create that memory without delay, rather than postponing indefinitely until the most convenient time. After all, that’s the philosophy that led to the creation of this blog.
And I believe we made the right call. At home after the trip, it’s clear that our daughter’s brain lit up with new connections in Florida. She’s communicating with us more every day, and she’s pointing out an increasing number of things in her environment with even more curiosity than before.
We also created some major memories for all the big people, including my dad, who joined us and spent some dedicated bonding time with our daughter. These memories are already buoying me through our preparations for the next round of IVF injections.
We made the right choice taking the trip, but that doesn’t mean it was straightforward. The calendars in our lives did their best to befuddle our adventure. The easiest way share this part of the story is with a timeline:
- December 2023: We prepare for a new cycle of IVF and start planning Disney
- Early January 2024: We start the new cycle and book our first set of Disney dates
- Mid-January: A cyst on my ovary stops our cycle dead in its tracks
- Days Later: A second ultrasound confirms the cyst hasn’t resolved
- Late January: We start a new cycle and deliberate over a new set of Disney dates that won’t interfere with our revised IVF calendar — or other, theoretical IVF calendars, in case this one also goes wrong
- Early February: We change our Disney and flight dates to the only week in March that makes sense financially and practically — unfortunately, it’s Spring Break. If our cycle goes well, we’ll be finished with our egg retrieval, and we’ll take a natural pause during the trip. If the cycle is delayed again, we might end up traveling while I’m on birth control to prepare for a new cycle. This is doable, but not ideal, because I sometimes experience annoying side effects. We cross our fingers.
- Mid-February: The cyst is still there, but smaller. We move forward with injections.
- Late February: Our cycle is canceled. My ovaries create too few follicles, or spaces for eggs to grow. We’re devastated.
- Early March: We wait to see when my next period will start. If it starts before Disney, I’ll need to take birth control on the trip (downside), but we’ll get to move forward with our next cycle more quickly when we return home (upside).
- Five Days Before Disney: My period starts. We hurry in for an appointment and start our next cycle the day before we get on the plane.
- Mid-March: We head to Disney! I take my birth control every night before bed in an attempt to avoid side effects…and it works!
- Late March: We return home, prepare for another round of injections, and cross our fingers.
As you can imagine, this timeline was fraught with moments of anxiety and sadness between the major bullet points. More than once, we considered canceling the trip altogether. Worse still, we worried that this second attempt at IVF would ultimately fail. It was clear throughout our planning that we needed to prepare for all outcomes, both practically and emotionally.
To prepare practically, I researched all the fine print associated with rescheduling or canceling both our Disney dates and our flights, and I wasn’t surprised at all when that information came in handy. Both changes involved a lengthy phone conversation, but I walked away successful, having spent less than $200 extra for a new itinerary with one day added.
In terms of emotional preparations, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are some outcomes that will inevitably engulf you, regardless of how you steel yourself. Travel is a strategy I use to mitigate the waves of inevitable emotion throughout IVF. This time around, I obsessed over Disney restaurant reservations, ideal ride itineraries, and the nuances of Disney’s Genie + service rather than focusing all that energy on my unpredictable body. For the most part, the distraction worked. I put on a pair of Minnie ears, took my daughter’s hand, and we tackled the messy world with as much wonder as possible, while all the unknowns came our way.