Need advice on how to tell sister!

newmomkaren

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Hey guys, I would love some advice on my dilemma. My sister has been trying to get pregnant for several years now with no luck. As those of you who have been TTC for a long time would understand, she has been especially sad and emotional about this. I'm four years younger than my sister and I just got married two months ago. Out of the four months that we have been TTC , I have gotten a BFP twice. The first ended in miscarriage a couple of months ago when I was 8 weeks along. I told her about that pregnancy when I was 5 weeks because we are pretty close and I didn't want her to feel left out. Although she was excited for me, I could sense that she had mixed feelings. I just got another BFP yesterday, and last night we talked on the phone about her having possible endometriosis and possible ovarian cancer and needing surgery. I'm nervous about telling her about the pregnancy because of everything that she has been through, but at the same time, I don't want her to feel left out if I don't tell her because we are pretty close. Any suggestions on when to tell her, and when I tell her how should I tell her? I'm worried that if I wait, she'll be upset that I didn't share such big news with her. I love my sister and I don't want to hurt her. I just feel like I'm stuck in a no-win situation.
 
She is going to have mixed emotions whenever you decide to tell her. If she also may have ovarian cancer than it could be a while before she is allowed to ttc again. (I hope very much this is not the case.) After watching a family member go through ovarian cancer I know how important it was for her to be around positive news - even when it made her a bit sad about what she was missing.

Let her know that this baby is her baby as well, which it some ways it is. Let her know that you understand the news can be upsetting even though you know she is happy for you. Tell her that you love her.

I am sure she would want to know based on what you have said so just give her room to express and feel all the emotions that will come.
 
If you're close she'll probably do her best to be happy and supportive. Just don't expect cartwheels or her asking after your pregnancy...especially if she has the threat of cancer hanging over her own head. TTC might even be taking a back seat at this point.

Having been at the receiving end of pregnancy announcements shortly after my own losses, I would say that saying it as concisely and even cheerfully as possible is the best way to go about it and let her react in her own way. Say something like "I just wanted you to know" I think being overly apologetic will just make her focus on how sad this is for her and make her feel like an object of pity.

and congrats on your own bfp. You've had a loss too and you deserve some happiness in your life too.
 
I would say don't wait on telling her. It feels worse when it seems like people are hiding things from you. I always preferred an announcment over email or phone so people didn't see me wince. It has nothing to do with her not being happy for you, I think you get that. It just will make her sad for herself and her partner.
 
I got married in 2010 and started NPNT right away. We started TTC in October 2011 and by 2012 I was seeing a fertility doctor. During that time my sister and two close friends got pregnant. They were all concerned about my feelings. I was happy for all of them when I found out. I was relived when my friend told me because I thought she was going to tell me she was ill. She kept calling and saying we had to talk in person and needed to to commit to a date. I appreciated that they told me one on one and face to face. It also helped to know that while they should be celebrating their joy, they were concerned about me. That's a true friend!

Now I am pregnant after IVF. I have a friend that has been TTC for 4 years. We were seeing the same fertility doctor. It broke my heart to tell her but this is how I did it. I took her to lunch and asked how she was doing. We talked about so much. Midway through I told her I was pregnant. She cried but said she was happy for me. I let her tell me her feelings and I was not upset. We both ended up crying. In the end she said that me getting pregnant gives her hope. I promised to be there every step of the way for her and I mean that.

Ok so this has gotten long. My advice is to tell your sister in person. Maybe after your first scan to confirm all is well with your baby. Just the two of your should be present. Let her have her moment. She will be happy for you but she may not give you the big CONGRATS celebration. Reassure her that she will be alright and let her you will be there.

I just want to say that you are a great sister for caring so much about your sister's feelings. I pray your sister does not have cancer. Congratulations and enjoy your pregnancy. You deserve it! :happydance:
 
I was also on the receiving end of announcements, as my 2 sisters had back and forth pregnancies the entire 4 years we were TTC. With the 4th pregnancy, my one sister was so upset to tell me that she had my OTHER sister call and give me the news. That was especially hard for me, knowing she couldnt tell me, and since the sister that DID tell me had just had a baby 2 weeks before when she said she had "news" I sure wasn't expecting it to be a pregnancy! And that day I was towards the end of my 2WW and feeling crampy and KNEW my period was about to start (no one told me pregnancy felt the same, and I got my BFP the following week!). Looking back, it didn't matter how I was told, or when in the pregnancy (we all wait a while), it felt like a slap in the face. And it hurt even more that I had a hard time being happy for my sisters when my issues had nothing to do with their successes! It never took too long for me to get over myself, and I was able to attend several of their births even though we lived far apart. LTTTC is such a hard thing to deal with, when you hear of so many "oops" babies (to this day I don't understand how that happens...pregnancy is soooo easy to avoid) and people conceiving on their first cycle trying. I remember my sister calling crying that she had an early MC at like 6 weeks, and while I cried with her about it, I couldn't help but feel like even a MC would be a step in the right direction for me. Now I realize how misplaced those feelings were. If you live nearby, I think telling her in person, privately, is the best thing to do. Expect tears of sadness and happiness and understand that joy and sorrow can overlap.
 
This is LONG but I'm going to tell you my experience and it might help in your situation so just take it for what it is:

Your sister is going to eventually know that you are pregnant, especially since you are close. I think best way to tell her is that you understand this is a very hard time with her for her possible endometriosis and you wouldn't want to tell her about your pregnancy except that you'd rather her hear it directly from you now than find out about it from someone else or only after seeing your bump, etc. Just explain that at some stage, she's going to know, and you wanted to just talk with her in private to tell her and let her know it is okay if she is a bit upset.

I actually had possible endometriosis for 10 years. Absolutely horrible, often ended up in the hospital on morphine. I originally started on a nutritional program to ease the pain but also wanted to safeguard any future chance I had of conception and nothing medically done had helped me. I did three separate nutritional programs, the third under the direct care of a trained naturopath who had to have THE most amazing supplements on the planet. I had damage to my liver from all the pain medications I used to take when I first came to her. After a month I no longer had an inflamed liver and my levels checked out as normal, hormones had balanced (as liver regulates hormones). I stopped having erratic, highly painful periods (and when I say erratic I mean that when I was 19 I had my period every single day for four entire months straight and it was black and looked like coffee grounds so I'm not talking about some strangeness with a mostly normal period, I'm talking about I had a serious issue going on in my body) There were many points in my past where I could have and probably should have gotten pregnant but didn't. I started to doubt whether or not I could. When I went through this nutritional program, when I was at the tail end of it, I successfully got pregnant. I wasn't even trying to. My step-sister also has been diagnosed with endometriosis and was so happy for me to hear that I am pregnant but admitted she is jealous because she has been told her chance of having a baby is "slim" I was like, "That's BS. Don't listen to the doctors." I directed her to the website where I first started getting my supplements and teas (https://natural-fertility-info.com/ not sure if I'm allowed to plug a site on these boards but I swear I do not work for this site in any way shape or form lol, just trying to help) and I told her to start on raspberry leaf tea and then do the liver cleanse kit and there's also an endo kit. The nutritional program I ended up doing this last time wasn't from this site but that website is where I got started, and I would suggest it to your sister if I were you! It could really help, and then I suggest she gets in touch with a good naturopath. They are NOT quacks. Believe me, after 10 years of dealing with MDs that had no idea how to fix me except pain killers and possibly operating on me and then I go a totally nutritional and naturopathic route and have my severely painful periods disappear and in their place have light, normal, regular periods, I have so much faith in nutrition and naturopathic methods because THEY were what produced results for me. No one can convince me otherwise, and honestly, it's not expensive to go see a naturopath or to get some of those teas and kits off that website and it's worth a shot. It's far better than living in despair and hopelessness that you will never be able to conceive.

So, when I told my step-sister, I actually had no idea she'd been diagnosed with endometriosis, but as soon as she told me that, I told her to do exactly what I did, take the supplements I took, do a liver cleanse, take high quality vitamins, cut out processed foods and eat really nutrient-dense foods, etc. I gave her a whole lecture lol. But it made her feel better to see that I had something similar and I overcame it and got pregnant so quickly after doing it. It is entirely possible that she could have enough improvement from nutritional therapy that she could conceive. So when you tell your sister, tell her you are so sorry to have to tell her this but you'd rather tell her now yourself than her find out later, and also that you have some suggestions you learned from a crazy girl who writes way too much on the pregnancy forums about her own endometriosis and what she did to overcome it :) Oh and just for the record I never had endo confirmed because I never had health insurance to get a biopsy. I just kept ending up in the hospital. But there IS light at the end of the tunnel.

I know your sister might be a bit disappointed (or more than a bit) but I do think she'd be more upset to learn it later on or even from someone else, so it IS a conversation I think you should have, gently and compassionately, and I would definitely suggest these things to her to give her a possible route to pregnancy. Like I say, I wasn't even trying. So I really do believe in the power of nutritional therapy to restore your body's own ability to regulate itself, plus I think endometriosis as a disease is far more common than it used to be and that probably has something to do with the increase of processed foods in the society. I won't give you my whole shpeal but just suffice it to say it worked for me and it's worth a shot mentioning to your sister, if only to show her that you care and you're trying to help her and you're showing her compassion.
 
DH and I got married in November last year and we started trying straight away. I wanted to get pregnant ASAP so I started temping and using opk’s in the hope to get the timing right. I got pregnant in June this year which ended in a mc in July at 6 weeks.

My sister got married in June and they wanted to start TTC 6 months after the wedding so I advised her to get off the pill after the wedding and start temping to see what her cycles are doing. She really didn’t know anything about TTC so I taught her everything I knew and had learned from all the research I had done in the last 7 months.

Two weeks after my mc it was my mums birthday and we all went over her place for a bbq. It was one of the first places I had been since the mc as it hit me so hard I blocked the whole world out. Well before we sat down for dinner my sister announced that she was pregnant. My heart sunk into my stomach and I immediately had a lump in my throat and wanted to run away and cry. I held it together and tried my hardest to show my sister how happy I was for her. I truly was 1000% happy for her, but I was really sad for me. As soon as DH got in the car I cried my eyes out. How could we try so hard for 9 months temping and using opk’s and she wasn’t even trying and she just sneezed and got pregnant!

My sister found out a week before that she was pregnant and she had already been to the doctor and mum and dad already knew. She waited a week before telling me because she was so worried about breaking it to me because she knew I had only just had a mc and we had been trying for 9 months already. I think it’s nice that she thought about my feeling but it actually hurt that she kept it from me for a week because we were so close.

If I was in that position again, I think it would be much easier for me if she had told me via text. I could have hid behind my texts and faked my happiness just to give me time to process it. Trying to put on a brave face in front of my whole family who knew I was dying in side was horrible. Everyone was watching my reactions, and it’s only because they were all concerned about how I would take it but I just wanted to be alone. I know I could have cried in front of my family and they would have understood 100%, but I didn’t want my sister to feel like I wasn’t happy for her or that she couldn’t tell me about her pregnancy because I knew that all I needed was a little time.
 
I don't see why you need to tell her straight away. If I hadn't have had ivf, I would have been waiting on my scan to tell my family. As they knew we were going through it, they all knew. Ow even though I didn't tell everyone the outcome, everyone knows.

I'll add my story here and keep it short. This is my first bfp three years after starting. I had two laparoscopies for endometriosis, both times only tiny amounts were found! Anyway after my first lap, I was told I had a blocked tube and was devastated. While I was recovering, about three days later, I got a text from a friend who knew the situation. I told her I'd had some bad news and she was sympathetic. However, within the next couple of days, She tried to call me but I was too tired to answer and thought, I'll call her back. She then text letting me know her good news, shed had her first scan.

Her timing was atrocious. I suppose as someone said the time may never be right. She could also go through a lot worse before you manage to tell her. Maybe judge the feeling and tell her. I'm sure you'd never be as callous as my friend. But if she is waiting on results maybe best to tell her before hand. She's your sister so will always be happy for you but she will have a sadness for her own situation. Xx
 

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