Thanks for joining me!

Good company in a journey makes the way seem shorter. — Izaak Walton

Today I went back to work, after a third (and hopefully final) operation to treat my endometriosis.

It felt good to be back into a normal routine, and this has kickstarted my plan to restart my blog.

I have been doing lots of research lately, but haven’t always put the things I have discovered into practice. That is going to change!

It’s a week until my 44^th birthday, and I have decided there’s no time like the present, so here we go…

When I started my blog the last time, I was part way through my IVF journey, and I found it too difficult to talk (or write) about the times a cycle wasn’t successful. There was so much pressure and expectation (mostly from myself, I hasten to add). Time and money were running out. My dream to have a child was all-consuming.

After 4 failed IVF’s in 3 years, I stopped all fertility treatments in 2016. It was a very dark time for me, but it wasn’t until I looked back recently that I realised quite how depressed I had become. There was no meaning in my life, and nothing gave me any joy. It felt as though I was simply going through the motions. I had lost my purpose in life, and I was struggling.

2 years later, I have taken the time to grieve properly, and have moved forward. Not moved ON, because there will always be a part of me that has a pang of sadness when I remember the family life that I had wished for, but it is becoming more manageable every day. I have come to terms with the idea that I will never be a mother. I have managed to focus my energy into finding a new purpose, and have discovered a new zest for life.

I love helping other people, and have thrown myself into volunteering. I am involved in running a support group for people with endometriosis, and it gives me so much happiness to be able to help others to find answers they desperately need.

I finally feel ready to write about my experiences again. I am doing this more for my general health, and to help me find ways to improve it, rather than for fertility reasons. If I find solutions that may be of use to other people in time to save their fertility, then all the better.

This time there’s less urgency, and I have decided to document my progress in ALL areas of my life. I have an ever-increasing feeling that all areas of a person’s life are intertwined, and that it is not possible to heal without addressing everything else in a holistic manner. A particular bugbear of mine about medical care in the UK (but the same could probably be said about most Western societies) is that we aren’t able to treat a person as a whole. Each time I see my GP about an ailment, I get referred to a different specialist, none of whom know anything about my other conditions. It’s so frustrating.

My first area to address is diet. I have played about with this for several years, with some success, but never properly recorded my progress.  I will also start to document my infertility journey, and the minefield of trying to get answers. Along that journey, I discovered I had endometriosis, which gave me further hurdles to jump, and a lot more research to do. My aim is to blog at least once a week, and to document some of the research I have been doing online over the last few years into endometriosis, genetics and infertility.

Good luck on your own journeys, and feel free to message me if you have any questions!