Posts Tagged ‘awareness’
National Infertility Awareness Week
Written by Arpee on October 24, 2008 – 12:26 am -Oct 19-25, 2008 is the National Infertility Awareness Week. Most, if not all, people who visit this blog are struggling or have struggled through infertility, and thus we are the best spokespeople for infertility and raising awareness to it.
Some of us are pretty open about the process we are going through in our quest for a baby - we talk and write about it to friends and family and we let them know of our blogs so that they can visit it on their own conveniences.
Some of us are going through this journey to baby secretly, with a lot of friends and relatives not aware of what we have to go through.
Some of us are somewhat in the middle. I think I fall under this category. I answer to queries about us having children but most of the time though, I do not volunteer information about our “saga of becoming fruitful”.
I have an answer to people who really want to know what is going on and who I trust to hold those answers confidentially. I also try to weigh how much I share since not everyone is interested in the whole nine yards.
I have a different answer to people who I am not comfortable with - those who think they know it all on how to make babies, those whose personalities treat stuff lightly or those who just want to know but cannot hold their tongues (use the information to share to others who have no business of knowing).
I (We) have spent a lot of time culling information about our diagnosis, treatments and of our fellow infertiles’ experiences. Maybe even too much information, TMI in infertili-tese. We can probably teach lessons on this now.
My simple mind tells me that there are 4 types of people we are interacting with in our everyday infertile lives:
1. Tactful people who know about infertility - We like them because they “understand”.
2. Tactful people who do not know about infertility - Potentially, these are the people who are open to be educated more about infertility and become our friends, allies and advocates.
3. Tactless people who know about infertility - These ones I would avoid because they do not have a compassionate heart for our sufferings (that they already know of).
4. Tactless people who do not know about infertility - They may still have hope 
So there really is an opportunity and value in having an Infertility Awareness Week (Why not a month?) and making people more aware about infertility…
So what am I going to do in connection with National Infertility Awareness Week? Well, I just wrote a piece in my personal blog about it in the hopes that friends and family become more aware of this thing called infertility.
How about you? How are you going to make the people in your circle of influence more aware of infertility?
Posted in Conversation, In Between Cycles | 1 Comment »
