#AtoZChallenge: N is for Nurses

This is the fourteenth of a series of posts that I’m posting during the A to Z Challenge; that’s a blogging challenge where you aim to post a blog post for each letter of the alphabet throughout the month of April (with Sundays off for good behaviour). During my first A to Z Challenge I wrote about infertility, which I’m sort of revisiting during A to Z Challenge 2015.

My theme this year is IVF/ICSI, a process we’re starting at the moment and today it’s N for Nurses. 

Something that came as a bit of a surprise to me when we started the whole fertility treatment process was the fact that much of your treatment process involves appointment with nurses rather than with doctors. This seems to be a British thing because when I’ve read blogs of people in the US they talk about appointments with the doctor for things that we would go to see the nurse about.

This doesn’t mean that your level of care is any different. The nurses work as part of a team with the doctor, so you see them for tests, scans and updates about your treatment protocol, then they feed that back to the doctor who will advise them about the next steps and that is then passed back to you. It sounds complicated, but it enables the doctors to stay focused on important things and gives you a point of contact during your treatment.

Chances are you’ll see several different nurses throughout the process. They’re not tied to the hospital and they do have lives of their own so the nurse you first see at the beginning of treatment won’t necessarily be your own personal nurse the whole way through. It’s okay to have favourites but expect to see lots of faces (and have lots of faces looking at bits of your body you’d usually prefer to keep private).

The nurses will be able to answer any of your questions, in fact that’s what they’re there to do. They’ll see you through the whole treatment process; remember their ultimate goal is pretty much the same as yours. It’s important to speak to them about any concerns or worries. One of the things I’m careful to raise with the nurses we’ve seen so far with this treatment cycle is the issue of overstimulation that I experienced before. It’s not that I don’t trust them to share the information, but I want to make sure that we’re all on the same page when it comes to discussing treatment.

I always feel bad that I don’t always remember their names because they're doing such an important job. It’s like there’s so much other information that you need to take in during your appointments that your brain can’t quite hold onto it all. I do make an effort but sometimes it’s embarrassing when you realise you’ve forgotten someone’s name when they only introduced themselves ten minutes ago. This problem only gets worse once you start taking the hormones!

If a friend or family member is going through IVF or ICSI treatment, remember they’ll probably be seeing a lot of different people during their hospital appointments and it can be hard to keep them all straight. They might moan about a particular nurse that they’ve seen because they weren’t too gentle with the blood draw or the scan, but rest assured, they’re very grateful to the people treating them and a lot of the time it’s probably just the hormones talking.