Last
weekend, at the BogHer 2010 in conference in New York, I had the chance
to attend a panel about blogging
grief, loss and tragedy on the internet. One of the
panelists was Cecily Kellogg, who blogs as Uppercase Woman
and is a noted infertility blogger. Cecily was on the panel to share
her experiences after she developed preeclampsia and was forced to
terminate her twin pregnancy at 23.5 weeks to save her own life. The
stories of all of the panelists, including Cecily’s, were heartbreaking,
but they were hopeful as well.
Many people are uncomfortable hearing or even reading about someone’s grief. As people undergoing infertility treatments or with the infertility diagnosis, we are all acutely aware of this. We’ve all suffered through those uncomfortable moments where well meaning family and friends joke about how you’re not getting any younger and you’d better think about having kids before your ovaries shrivel up. If you explain that you’ve been trying for several years and start mentioning ovarian reserve testing and male factor infertility, people just don’t know how to react.
Despite the inability of onlookers to process open grief, everyone on the panel indicated that blogging and the online community they’d found, saved them in many ways. Listening to the women on the panel discuss their grief and loss openly was refreshing. You see, when my husband and I were struggling to have our first child, I wasn’t blogging yet. I kept a diary and it helped to write about it, but we weren’t really sharing our experiences with anyone we knew. The very first time I got pregnant, we told everyone. After I lost the baby, we decided we weren’t going to be in that position again, openly grieving in front of everyone.
Read the rest of this post on the Attain Fertility blog....
Just a reminder to everyone (and to make the FTC happy), I'm a paid outside consultant and Community Manager for Attain Fertility. But I did not attend BlogHer on their dime.
