Himfertility

About this book

What happens when the family you want becomes the hardest thing you have ever tried to build? Himfertility is one man's unflinching account of nearly a decade of infertility, loss, and the particular fear that comes from loving someone through the most grueling journey a marriage can take.Told from the father's perspective, this is not a clinical story. It is a human one. Eleven IUIs. Two rounds of IVF. Nine pregnancies. Seven losses. A NICU. A pandemic. And through all of it, the deliberate, daily choice to be a couple first.Ravi Shah writes from the other side of the room: the waiting room, the parking lot, the delivery suite. He writes honestly about the quiet weight of unexplained infertility, about what it means to be the person who is not the patient and cannot do the part that matters most, and about the particular emotional arithmetic of holding hope after it has been disproven again and again. He does not soften any of it. He also does not forget to find something to laugh about.When their first son is born and immediately transferred to the NICU with a HIE diagnosis, the story becomes something else entirely: a different kind of fear, a different kind of vigil, and a sixteen-day reckoning with what it means to stand beside an isolette and rest your hands on your child's feet because that is all you are allowed. The years that follow bring more loss, more waiting, and finally the birth they had been working toward.Himfertility is for every man who has sat in a waiting room with nothing useful to do. For every couple who has learned to hold hope carefully. For NICU parents who understand what those sixteen days feel like from the inside. And for anyone navigating a journey whose ending they cannot yet see.