How to Treat Infertility and the Stress it Brings into Our Lives

My wife and I had struggled with infertility for 5 years before we were blessed with our first child. We were constantly faced with the question of how to treat infertility. We had heard it all from well meaning friends (and relatives)...

"Just relax and you'll get pregnant...."
"Take a vacation...."
"Don't think about it too much...."
"You're trying too hard...."
"Just adopt and you'll get pregnant...."

But none of their pat answers gave us much hope as we dealt with the gnawing question of how to treat infertility. One thing that infertility did produce in our lives and our marriage was stress. Maybe you are dealing with the question of how to treat infertility and the ensueing stress that comes with it. This article will address the issue of stress that is produced through infertility.

When you are trying to get pregnant, it is impossible not to feel stress as months pass by and diagnoses are confirmed. Hope waxes and wanes depending upon what treatment is available and how long you have been trying to get pregnant. Add to this emotional mixture the real demands of doctor's visits, medications, monitoring, and cost, and it would seem impossible for stress not to enter the picture of coping with infertility.

Stress can have a dramatic impact on one's reproductive life. Most physicians and mental health professionals who work in this field have encountered men who have experienced temporary impotence when diagnosed with azoospermia (the inability to produce sperm), or women who have temporarily lost all interest in sexual intimacy after a diagnosis of female factor infertility. Feelings about our fertility are entwined in our feelings about sexuality. Many women with infertility will share with their doctorsthat they do not feel like "real women" and are not members of the club who have experienced pregnancy and childbirth. These women will tell me that they feel like outsiders at social functions when talk inevitably turns to children related topics. Men can often feel that having normal sperm function is related to virility, when in fact impotence (male sexual dysfunction) and male infertility are not the same. Hearing phrases such as "he shoots blanks" reinforces feelings of inadequacy and complicates these feelings for men.

As you face the question of how to treat infertility, stress is a normal by product. Rest assured that it is a normal reaction to an abnormal situation. Oh sure, you can relax, take a vacation and not not think too much about it, but infertility will produce stress. Whatever you do, just try to minimize it.

Studies have been concducted about stress and whether it can produce infertility. They have been inconclusive.