Before I went through IVF, I thought I knew what it involved. Injections. Scans. A procedure. A wait. A result.
What I did not know - what nobody really tells you - is what it does to you on the inside.

Not just physically, though the physical side is significant. The injections that bruise your abdomen black and blue. The scans every other day that dictate your entire schedule. The way your body stops feeling like your own and starts to feel like a medical project. The hormones that send you swinging between hope and despair, sometimes within the same hour.

But none of that is the hardest part.

The hardest part is the emotional reality of it. The way IVF asks you to become simultaneously completely invested and completely detached. You have to care enough to do everything right - to take every injection on time, to eat the right things, to rest when they tell you to rest - and you also have to protect yourself enough not to be completely destroyed if it doesn't work. Those two things are almost impossible to hold at the same time.

I remember the morning after our embryo transfer, lying very still in a hotel room we had booked so I wouldn't have to face the drive home. We had watched our favourite DVDs because someone had told us that thrillers raised cortisol levels and might prevent implantation. We had a bowl of Brasil nuts and pineapple juice because I had read it helped thicken the womb lining. We had done everything right. And I remember lying there thinking: this is it. It has to be this time.

It was not that time.

And then came the grief of it - a grief that is very hard to explain to someone who has not been through it. Because what do you tell people you have lost? There is no name for it. There is no ceremony. There is no casserole on the doorstep. You just go back to work on Monday and pretend that the last two weeks of your life did not happen.
I want to say something clearly to anyone who is going through IVF, or who has been through it and is still carrying the weight of it: your grief is real. The embryos you grew and lost were real. The hope you had was real. You are allowed to mourn it.

I also want to say this: IVF is not the only measure of your worth as a person, a woman or a potential parent. I know it can feel that way when you are in the middle of it. I know how all-consuming it becomes. But you are so much more than your results.

There are things I wish I had known before I started. I wish someone had told me to build in proper time to grieve between cycles, rather than throwing myself straight back in. I wish someone had told me that it was okay to ask for counselling and that asking for help was not the same as giving up. I wish someone had told me that IVF failing does not mean your body has failed - it means one approach did not work, and that is not the same thing.

Mostly, I wish someone had sat across from me and said: whatever happens, you are going to be alright. Because you are. And so are you, wherever you are reading this right now.

If you are going through IVF right now, or recovering from a cycle that did not work, you are not alone. Inconceivable is the full story of what the IVF journey really felt like - and what came after. You can also find IVF support organisations for the UK and Ireland in The Library.