I have been listening to a lot of positive motivational speakers in my car lately, and I came across the concept of “positive knowing”, verses “positive thinking”.
The basic idea is that positive thinking, although very important to focusing you on potential positive outcomes, has the danger of ending up being positive wishing and hoping.
Positive knowing is where you take the steps and do the things that bring you to the point where you absolutely know, with complete certainty, that you can achieve your goals.
I know with infertility it is impossible to get to a place of positive knowing.
Once the procedure is done, and the embryos are transferred, the ability to know whether or not implantation will occur and a viable pregnancy will begin is beyond our control.
But many steps can be taken to increase the odds of success leading up to that point, so you have some comfort knowing you have covered all the bases you can prior to an embryo transfer.
The first step is to know as much about the functions of your own biological baby makers as soon as possible.
We found that our insurance covered many of the diagnostic tests since they were ordered by Lisa’s OB BEFORE we did any infertility procedures.
Once a diagnosis of infertility had been made, it was much harder to get anything covered, unless it involved quality of life surgeries for Lisa’s endometriosis.
My initial sperm sample was covered, and when it came out low, my primary care doctor referred me to an urologist to check for blockages and damage.
For the most part that was covered by insurance.
One thing we didn’t do was find out if the doctor we were seeing was a reproductive endocrinologist.
Perhaps it has changed now, but when we were in our fertility journey, we learned that there were quite a few OBgyns who also dabble in infertility procedures, without actually being reproductive infertility specialists.
Given the combination of problems that Lisa and I had, in hindsight, we probably should have gotten the opinion of an RE at that point.
Lisa had wanted to go to IVF as soon as she learned about my low count.
I battled her, primarily because I didn’t want to pay for the consult, and didn’t believe that we could possibly need to go to such drastic measures like IVF to have a child. I figured my positive visions of one of my one million sperm count boy making some miracle journey past the goalie to win the fertility game would overcome our medical reality.
My trip down the river of denial cost us a lot of money a few years later—and it took 5 IVFs for us to finally get our soul baby.
Six years after we started, our decision to fly across country to St. Barnabas to get our baby was based largely on knowing the statistical success rates of their clinic posted on the SART website based on our combined problems in our age group, and from what we had learned from each failure along the way.
We kept adjusting and adapting our plan in our final year of infertility, and there was a sense of “knowing” at our first consult with St. Barnabas that we were finally on the winning path.
Positive motivation kept us fired up to head towards our goal even when one failure after another tried to drag us down.
Positive knowing gave us confidence in our decisions.
We knew we had educated ourselves with as much information about our own medical case as possible.
Through our research we came to know the people and clinic that we were hiring to help us.
There is no way I can say that all this “knowing” is what finally resulted in our success with St. Barnabas.
Perhaps it was just luck.
Then again, maybe there is some truth to the old saying that luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, even when it comes to infertility.