Making ART/IVF better for partners

[neane]

hi all i totally agree that something needs to be done to include partners and meet their needs. My DH found it super difficult when he gave sample even though the room was away from prying eyes he said that whilst attempting to give it his best shot as he put it, it was like being a teenager again and nearly being caught by your mother. dh could hear every sound door open and close conversations of staff outside the room. i was glad that there were very few people in the waiting room area as the hallway completely echoed and i could hear the nursing staff explain alot of details of where he need to put his manly hood sample once he was done. I think more needs to be done to offer support to all partners in general.

[slyder]

He also made the point that clinics would encounter a huge range of human reactions, and their responses to individuals would be tempered by their overall experiences, so you will rarely have one person who is happy with every aspect of the service. I think this is to be expected to a certain extent in every facility where a diverse range of clilents come through on a reular basis. I understand some men need to feel more involved, but usually a medical practice will concern themselves with the primary patient - not just fertility clinics, but all medical facilities. Even if the issue is MF, the primary patient is the one who they are conducting the bulk of the medical procedures on.

I agree, as I mentioned earlier, that clinics will encounter a range of reactions from the fellas making it hard for them to know how to react to the male on a case by case basis.

I don't believe that it is reasonable to direct the vast majority of conversation to the female, just because she is the patient. IVF is supposed to be a joint thing, and including the male in the equation can provide big benefits to the female after the appointments and procedures where two recollections of various instructions or procedures can often be better than one. Whilst I am not the one with the condom covered probe between my splayed legs in stirrups, or the one having my uterine wall punctured by a needle, I still like to know what they are doing to my wife for my own sake and so that I am able to support her and understand what is going on. Knowledge is power.

[sushee]

You see, I think this is hard to quantify. I have spoken to DH about the collection of his sample, and while uncomfortable, he believes what he endured is not a patch on the indignities I went through on a regular basis. And I agree. Try having an internal u/s with 3 people in the room, and the sperm sample collection sounds great in comparison.This is not to say things couldn't be better for him, but in comparison, it didn't seem so bad to him when he thought of what I went through regularly.

Again I do believe there is always room for improvement, but not just in the management of the men, but in the management of all of us. Maybe I'm the sort of woman who, while I feel for my DH, feels like if he felt uninvolved, he would make more of an effort to involve himself (and he did) and if he felt unhappy with the facilities, he would say so. Emotional support provided by the clinic for women is pretty poor as it is, judging from the stories I've heard around the traps, so if the man receives even less, to me it would seem in proportion to how much he is viewed by the clinic as a patient compared with the woman.

ETA slyder, I agree with conversations being directed only to the woman is not on. If both man and woman are there, I would expect them not to ignore my husband, and to my clinic's credit, they never did. That is on par to tradespeople only talking to him despite the fact that I called them, I know what needs to be done and I'll be the one paying them. That's just manners.

[belle333]

Hi Everyone

My hubby is excited about the prospect of becoming a father and is also concerned about my health and makes gentle reminders from time to time about things that I should or shouldn't do. But at the same time he is dissassociated from the IVF process and does not retain information about the drugs or stages of treatment. We've also had the conversation re: childbirth - he doesn't want to be there. Of course we had an argument about it but he sees it as 'women's business' and would be outside the delivery room anyway.

I think he feels on the outside of this whole process that somehow apart from his 'production room' contribution he is not involved. Its kind of like having a party but not being invited. He openly and proudly tells friends that we have started the IVF process but I don't know how to make him feel reassured or more involved?????? ANY SUGGESTIONS?????

Production Room Experience: (sample for analysis). Hubby went into production room - said there were porn dvds catering for all tastes including bi. He was too afraid to put a DVD on in case he got the wrong one and that it had the reverse effect. Also after he produced his sample realised that he had left the door open .. just a little bit. OMG!!! ... anyway he told me a couple of days later .. we had a great belly laugh about it.

[sushee]

My DH went to a course Thurs and Friday and part of it required him to give an impromptu presentation on something he's passionate about, and the other was to be a prepared presentation. He gave his impromptu one on IVF and his POV on our journey. I saw his notes and I have to admit, he knows a lot more about it than I ever gave him credit for. He remembers the names of the drugs, dates and times, what happened and how he felt. I asked him again if he ever felt left out of the process and he said he (unlike me) could get as involved or be as removed as he wanted, and so his level of involvement had as much to do with him (or more) as the clinic.

I remember feeling lost and directionless when I first started IVF, and remember how much I depended on the clinic to lead me in those early days. As a woman I was lucky that I pretty much had the clinic's undivided attention and my own determination to learn more about my treatment meant that I eventually managed to fill in the blanks that the clinic left. For the man, I imagine it's a little more difficult - all the info is fed to the woman and the man comes from a point further back to learn as much as his partner would learn. But the info provided by the clinic is usually a fraction of what there is to know. I see someone like slyder on BB learning all he can about IVF and I think if more men took that sort of initiative, they would feel more involved. Yes the clinic can play a part in making things better, but to truly feel a part of it takes the kind of immersion into the subject that many men don't undertake.

In my case, DH reckons I talk about it enough to him for him to have absorbed a lot of it, and I recognise that his journey is always going to vary slightly from mine, in that he took in what he wanted and needed to at the time. So I still believe the onus is on each of us to decide the level at which we are involved, and to make it happen.

[nic]

In my case, DH reckons I talk about it enough to him for him to have absorbed a lot of it,

This sounds like something my DH would say Sushee! With us having to drive 200klms to our FS appointments we had a lot of time to talk about what would happen at that appointment, how we were feeling etc. The 2 hour drive home was for talking about what had happened at the appointment and talking through what had happened etc.
There were times were I felt like I was talking TOO much about it all, (especially on the 1000klms trip home after pick up and transfer LOL) but DH took it all in. He did read every bit of paper in the information pack from the clinic though, and read through the puregon booklet to walk me through the injections. He also sat with me when we did our initial interview over the phone, though the clinic had requested he be involved.

Nic

[Visitor9]

I found this thread fasinating as DH and I really dont talk about it all that much, We too have to drive 120kms to appointments so it is usually discussed at the time but never until we have to be somewhere. DH gets very embarassed about the donation part of it so we dont talk or laugh about it, he knows it is something that needs to be done but not to be discussed with anyone.I just ask if it has been done and he nods.
DH asked me this morning why the puregon pen was back in the fridge, I had to tell him I'd been jabbing for days, he laughed and said so when is the account going to arrive.
It was only years later that we had friends that were also doing IVF with the same clinic, one night at a dinner party our friends husband (who felt very easy at discussing these matters) nudged DH and wanted a conversation on the donation room. I could see DH getting more and more uncomfortable THAT is the part that he hates. He thinks it is bad enough that we need a team to fall pregnant , but we do because the "want" out weighs all the embarassement.
Bec

[summerluven]

Masturbatorium!!! I can't wait to tell DH that one.

He is always referring to his 2x2 cubicle. He dealt with it all quite well, but his first experience was a shocker.

When I first went to my gp to get things checked out, she sent DH for a sample just to rule out MF issues. The clinic was in an old house next to a hospital and commercial offices, and when he walked in all the nurses and female staff were obviously trying to make him feel comfortable by greeting him by his first name straight up and calling out to him from their kitchen and stuff as he walked down the hallway. They led him into the bathroom (just like a bathroom at your nan and pops place he reckons) and then told him when he was done to take his paper bag out the backdoor, across teh back yard and through a HOLE IN THE FENCE into the labs behind the house. He felt like such a devo. And to make matters worse....no 'reading material' supplied at all. Poor bugger.

He wasn't very happy when only a month later our newly acquired FS sent him for another one coz he didn't trust the first one. But his experiences with our clinic have been an improvement on his first.

Can't say I know what they call the little room though. I don't think it has a name! I do know that it faces another doctors reception room which has clear doors. That freaked DH out a bit, but he soldiered on.

As for how he is treated by the clinic staff....wonderful. He and our FS stuck up a pretty good relationship and were always jabbering on about fishing etc, to the point where I would be lying on the table, legs assunder, wondering when anyone was going to realise I was even there

And when I had to go back to the same hospital for surgery a few months after DS was born, DH took him up to see the girls and ended up feeding him in their staff room and chatting to them all. Did that on two occassions, and they always knew who he was and were always very interested (wonder if it was the fire brigade uniform??? Ahhhhhh, now the penny drops! Haha).

There were times when he felt that it was more all about me than him, and not about us as a couple, but they were few and far between, and always when he was feeling a bit touchy about the whole experience.

They are definately as much a part of the whole experience as we are and should be treated accordingly.

[{sarah}]

A suggestion for those worried about (or with DHs worried about) sounds outside the "sample room" or whatever you want to call it... Aaron took my ipod in with him so there was no way he'd hear anything going on outside.

[farmgirl77]

belle333 - i'm glad that i'm not the only one that has a dh that does not want to be there for childbirth - but still wants to be a father and is an active participant in IVF. we have had an argument about it, and only after a glass or two of wine did the truth come out - he is terrified of what is going to happen to me. He has this fear that I might die giving birth, and that as we have made a rational choice about doing IVF (rather than just falling pg by accident), that it would be his fault as we could have made the decision not gone through the process, therefor not got pg and therefore I would not die in childbirth. I think that his concern is made worse by the fact that we are doing this because of MFI. For him the involvement of IVF has taken the whole reproduction thing into the world of a rational decision, made worse with every appointment, every opportunity to pull out etc, and that just for him confirms that if anything goes wrong, he could have prevented it. Not a logical thought process, but prob a male thing.

sarah h - like the ipod suggestion!

An update - we are currently in the TWW and I think that this is the time that my dh has felt the most out of it so far. He made the comment on the way home that it has been the hardest bit as there is nothing to 'do', nothing to concentrate on and there was nothing he could do that would change or alter the outcome. Nothing any clinic can do about that : (