Amy Klein - The Trying Game: Get Through Fertility Treatment and Get Pregnant Without Losing Your Mind

An antidote to feeling overwhelmed, uninformed, and isolated, The Trying Game is a compassionate, often funny, well-researched, and ultimately empowering guide that candidly addresses every imaginable step on this journey.

Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone

I believe every woman doing fertility treatments needs her Amy Klein. Find yours! Its too scary and confusing to go it alone.

Alyssa Shelasky, The Cut

Infertility can be incredibly difficult to navigate emotionally and physically. As an IVF veteran, Amy Klein does an exceptional job of tapping into the emotional aspects of the infertility journey while also providing readers with helpful information about various fertility treatments from medical experts.

William Schoolcraft, MD, founder and medical director of CCRM Fertility

Amy Kleins The Trying Game is just what our fertility community needs right now. Unlike other fertility books, this is a real book for the real woman, written by a woman who has been there before. Im thrilled to be able to provide this as a resource to my patients.

Natalie Crawford, MD, MSCR, As a Woman podcast

Amy Kleins writing on fertility is candid, warm, and honest. She pulls no punches, and the result isnt just informativeits empowering. If youre struggling to create the family you imagined, Amys is the voice you want in your head, and your heart.

KJ DellAntonia, former editor of the New York Times Motherlode blog and author of How to Be a Happier Parent

Drip, drip, drip.

I watch the pink drops plunk into the toilet, seeing all my hopes and dreams go down the drain with them.

Im not injured. Its just my period.

JUST.

Id never been a big fan of my monthly menstrual cyclethe terrible cramps, the raging hormones, my bloated stomach, and, lets face it, all the messbut when trying to conceive, my period meant one thing: I wasnt pregnant.

There were many, many months I wasnt pregnant. And it wasnt pretty.

Staring down at the stained toilet water as salty tears tumbled down my face, the pain overwhelmed me. Stabbing jabs from my stomach reminded me, No, youre not going to be a mom yet.

I felt so alone. My friends who were mothers told me to keep trying and relax and have patience because it took them an incredibly long time to get pregnant (three months!!?#@!). Sure, I had a husband, but he didnt want to talk about this subject 24/7. (Yes, I would have talked about it for 247 hours if there were that many in a day.)

I didnt know where to turn.

At the bookstore, I eyed pregnancy books longingly, hoping Id Expect to be Expecting soon, but I couldnt find much on the subject of Trying to and not getting pregnant.

Online, I found a ton of fertility boards with WHLAWomen Who Love Acronyms, something I just made up to show you how annoying it can be when they talk about TTC (trying to conceive) with DH (dear husband) and their 2WW (two-week wait) after their BD (baby dance = sex) before they POAS (peed on a stick, i.e., took a pregnancy test) hoping for magic baby dust. These women had a lot to say with excellent emoticons and cutesy GIFs, but no real helpful tips.

On the other end of the spectrum, I found incredibly technical scientific information online about fertility, such as the study Mutations in an Oocyte-Derived Growth Factor Gene (BMP15) Cause Increased Ovulation Rate and Infertility in a Dosage-Sensitive Manner. Yet even with my health and science journalism background, I couldnt always decipher what all the studies meant or what their practical applications wereif they had any at all.

I just wanted someone to tell me how ovulation strips actually worked (did they?!), when it was time to go to a fertility doctor, and how to react to my friends in-your-face pregnancy announcement (do not throw Tupperware at your partner, trust me). Thats why I started writing about my quest to get pregnant for The New York Times Motherlode blog. I couldnt find anyone discussing the process in a straightforward, acronym-free manner. (I also couldnt find someone objective, who wasnt shilling a product or program like, Get Pregnant with Maca Wheatgrass Royal Jelly in Three Easy Steps!)

Heres an embarrassing confession: When I started writing the Fertility Diary column, my New York Times editor and I thought Id write about trying to get pregnant for a bit and then transition over to regular pregnancy issues. Probably three to six months, she said. HA! How naive we both were about fertility treatment.

There are so many different ways to be Not Pregnant: You can be younger with endometriosis or older with not enough eggs; your husband can have slow sperm (dont tell him that, though), or you may not have a partner involved at all. You can get pregnant and not stay pregnant, you might have a kid already but have trouble conceiving another, or you might simply not know what is wrongif theres anything wrong at allexcept for the fact that you are still Not Pregnant.

I wasnt one of those women who always knew she wanted to be a motherespecially after leaving my traditional Jewish community, where most of my friends had kids by age twenty-five. It was only after I married Solomon at forty-one and found myself pregnant a week later that I realized I really wanted to have a child. Over the next three years, I had ten doctors, nine rounds of IVF, four miscarriages, three acupuncturists, two rabbis, one Reiki healer, five insurance companies, two egg donors, thousands of pills, shots, supplements, and Band-Aids, an amazing repeat pregnancy loss specialistand one real, live baby. One beautiful baby.

Dont worry, this is not a book about how I got that baby. Everyone thinks that what they did to get pregnant is what you should do, but theres no one way for all of this to work. Ive eaten dozens of pineapple cores, immersed myself in a Jewish ritual bath, and had so many pins in me I thought Id entered a bloodletting clinic instead of an acupuncturists office.