COVER: Stress and distress of infertility

What you need to know:

There’s a lot of social pressure and personal grief behind being unable to bear children
Many women around the world are faced with infertility. Not being able to conceive demoralizes the zeal for a happy life in marriage that every woman wishes to have

Further devastation is brought on by those who mock her for being barren. Some of the people who know her can’t help but question why she doesn’t have a child as her age continues to advance. The immediate person she should turn to for comfort, her husband, has also changed in demeanor, he spends late and long hours at work, sometimes he stays over a week without returning home, making Isabella question his loyalty to their marriage. “I get the feeling that he could be having an affair with another woman because he desperately needs a child. I feel so down and I don’t know what to do anymore,” says Isabella, adding, “My house feels so empty because there’s no child to play around. I don’t have anyone to call me mommy and sometimes I end up crying because the pain of not being able to become a mother can be overwhelming.” Isabella has visited the hospital multiple times but doctors have not been able to help her. “One of the gynecologists told me that my fallopian tubes have problems,” states a gloomy Isabella.

“We don’t have such medical experts in Tanzania, so I used to ask one from Italy to visit my hospital and conduct the procedure. However, it is costly as the journey to conceive needs time and it might take a month. During the course of infertility treatments, the embryologist will be involved from the start to finish of an in vitro fertilization – IVF cycle. During the testing phase before IVF treatments, the embryologist will prepare the embryology lab for infertility treatment by regulating and testing environmental conditions in the embryology laboratory including temperature, air quality, humidity and many more,” Dr Julius states. He also stated that after the whole process a woman has to wait and see if she has succeeded because at times the process fails and so it is repeated.