Clomid for Christmas

How to Survive Fertility Treatments During the Holidays

By Teri Brown

The holidays can be stressful. Buying and wrapping gifts, sending cards, close encounters of the family kind, extra baking and full schedules all work together to create an atmosphere of tension. Fertility treatments can be stressful, too. Hormone treatments, a packed medical schedule, worry and expectations all work together to create an atmosphere of anxiety. When you add them all together, you have a pressure cooker filled with stress, worry and potential burnout. But you can get through it all!

Dawn Friedman of Columbus, Ohio, spent one memorable Christmas on Clomid. "Clomid made me absolutely nuts," she says. "It exacerbated the stress something awful. It's like PMS multiplied by 70,000, so it certainly made the holidays more challenging!"

Another holiday challenge for women undergoing fertility treatments is the emphasis on children. Happy families dressed in red and white are seen everywhere. Holiday cards arrive daily from friends to extol the virtues of Jimmy or Susie who cut their first tooth, made the football team or got straight As on their report card. This doesn't help the couple still waiting for their own Jimmy or Susie.

Opening her Christmas cards became difficult for Friedman, who was acutely aware of the passage of time. "The year before and the year before, we were saying to each other, 'Surely we'll have a baby by next year! Surely we'll be hanging another stocking up next year!'" she says. "And so as each milestone passed – the holidays being a big one – it was a reminder that we were still waiting for that baby to arrive."

Harriette Rovner Ferguson, a psychotherapist specializing in infertility, agrees that the stress of the holidays is particularly difficult for women undergoing fertility treatments. "Infertility patients have a hard time through the holidays because of the emphasis on family," she says. "Most families believe that the holidays are a time that should be spent together regardless of individual circumstances. If the infertility patient ignores such a rule, it can many times make them feel as if in some way they have betrayed their family."

Want to see more?

• All I Want for Christmas: Coping with Infertility During the Holidays
• Dollars and Sense: Affording Infertility Treatment
• The Infertility Marketplace: How Success Rates Are Advertised
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