At the start of my infertility journey I attended a meet and greet at the fertility clinic to gather information. I was hopeful that this was the answer to all of my problems. I arrived and was immediately ushered into a lovely room and sat on a couch and awaited someone to come in and explain the process. Then in the course of 45 minutes, I met with 3 individuals...a nurse, the doctor and owner of the clinic and a financial expert...the amount of information they gave me was overwhelming, by the time I left I had a folder of paperwork, instructions to call on day one of my period, and that was it! By the time I got to my car, I was lucky I remembered my name. I came home at the end of the day and immediately did what anyone in the millennium would do...I surfed the web. I googled infertility and treatments...I located a series of chat rooms and discussion boards of many woman who were questioning their process and asking questions, and I immediately discovered that I was already out of my league. I was instantly baffled by the conversations as most of it was acronym after acronym. I am no stranger to acronyms, I am a duel military family after all, our bread and butter is the world of acronyms. This is the technical age also...You can't text or tweet without at least one acronym...LOL, LMAO, BRB, the list goes on and on. But these were new acronyms, and I was lost...TTC, DH, BFN, BFP...What did they mean? What was happening? Are we happy? Are we sad? Does it work? Have you had success? I wasn't sure about the outcome and I was concerned that this process was over my head. Why can't people just say what they mean. I had to google the acronyms just to read a sentence on one of these boards. I wanted to respond to each of these in the following manner..."OMG...WTF...WWUD?" " I can't LOL and I would BRB, but I don't think it would help." At the end of the day, infertility is just another selective group of people speaking their own language and bonding over an experience that only those who are a member of it would understand. And with anything else... Over time you realize that TTC = trying to conceive....BFP = Big Fat Positive...or BFN = Big Fat Negative and of course the illustrious DH = Dedicated Husband. Sometimes, I think...wouldn't it be funny to write a post and throw in random acronyms...just to stump the regulars? TOPIIA (tired of progesterone injections in ass) Who would notice? Or are we all so similar that the veterans would immediately be able to figure it out based solely on context? I guess there may be only one way to find out. Keep an eye out on your next discussion board for someone writing about the SOI and the DH not UTEROO...(if you can figure that one out...you are in fact a proud veteran of the infertility process!
