How are you? I’m excited to share that I’ve just booked my ticket to go to the British Podcast Awards, supporting my pals who have been nominated.
Sadly we didn’t make the list with The Fertility Poddy, but if you do love what we do and want to shout about it, you can still vote for the ‘Listeners Choice’ awards here.
You have until 4th July, so this is my only email opportunity to ask you 🙂 I’d love your support.
This episode is a slight shift from the norm, as it’s a conversation we recorded in March and I was trying to find the best time to share it.
Now, one thing you can know for sure, is that this podcast is always going to be talking about the importance of looking after your mental health, whilst trying to conceive.
Our episode this week is a conversation with Dr Zeynep Gurtin. A Lecturer in Women’s Health at the Institute for Women’s Health at UCL, and holds an Affiliate Lectureship at the University of Cambridge Sociology Department.
During six weeks from May 2020 Zenynep along with her a multidisciplinary team of 6 – clinicians, counsellors, psychologists gathered insight from a sample of 457 women to find out their experience of fertility treatment whose treatment has been delayed due to clinic closures.
The survey was an anonymous online long questionnaire – some quantitative, other questions asked for people to tell in their own words about the impact.
For many people, the dominant responses were that they were much less concerned about covid than their declining fertility. ‘I don’t want to look back and say that this virus is what robbed me of my last chance to become a parent.’ said one participant.
Words used to describe how people were feeling included;Â Powerless, helpless, frustrated, anxious, intense feelings.
‘When I heard the clinic was going to close I was completely devastated, my partner isn’t getting any younger and further delays to our treatment was beyond belief. It was a particularly bitter pill to swallow with all the jokes about lockdown baby boom’.
People talked about it as ‘yet another disruption’ people having to halt treatment in the past due to losses, for financial reasons, to stop caring for a family member – and now there was this.
We know that there are still so many patients who have been impacted by covid related delays and if this is you, you aren’t alone in how you are feeling.
