Interview with Cassie Silver

In honour of Infertility Awareness Week, I spoke with Cassie Silver about her experience navigating infertility, IVF, and the emotional landscape of trying to conceive. Through a path that was anything but straightforward, Cassie shares her story of treatment, loss, and eventual motherhood. 
With her podcast 'What to Expect When You’re Injecting' and her platform Fiercely Infertile, Cassie has created a space for honest conversations around infertility, breaking the silence often surrounding this experience. I was a guest on her podcast last year and it was one of the most cathartic things I've done since my own diagnosis.

In this interview, Cassie explores the loneliness of the journey, the impact on identity and relationships, and the importance of support, community, and emotional honesty.

How many years were you TTC?? 

Longer than I expected and shorter than some, which is both a comfort and a completely useless thing to say when you’re in the thick of it.
The honest answer is that my body had been making things complicated long before I even started trying. I’d met my gynaecologist, fertility specialist, and obstetrician, all the same brilliant man, before I ever met my husband. PCOS, endometriosis, one blocked tube. So I wasn’t exactly arriving at this fresh.

We tried naturally for a year. Then came egg collection number one in 2020: twenty-nine eggs retrieved, five embryos, all unsuccessful. Egg collection two in 2021 gave us seventeen eggs and eight embryos. And somewhere in that second batch, our son existed, and then our daughter. So the answer to ‘how long’ is: long enough to know that hope is both the most exhausting and the most stubborn thing a person can carry.

What brought you to starting IVF?

Both of my fallopian tubes were blocked. Add endometriosis and PCOS and IVF wasn’t really a choice so much as the only mathematical option left on the table. Which, in a strange way, was almost a relief.
My body had been complicated since I was a teenager. I’d had laparoscopies, procedures, monitoring, all before I’d ever thought seriously about having children. So by the time someone sat me down and said “IVF is your path,” I was quietly grateful that the decision had been made for me. I looked up and said: when can we start?
There is something oddly freeing about being told there is only one road. You stop second-guessing and you just drive.

Where did you find the courage to speak so openly about something so deeply personal?

Honestly? Loneliness.
I was so lonely on this journey and I couldn’t find a single resource that sounded like a real human being had written it. Everything was either clinical or falsely cheerful, the kind of relentless positivity that makes you feel worse, not better, because your experience doesn’t match the brochure.
I’m a journalist by background. Silence has always felt to me like a story worth breaking. So I broke it.
Courage is maybe too grand a word for what it actually was. It was more like: I’d rather be vulnerable and useful than private and alone. And once I made that decision, it stopped feeling brave and started feeling obvious.

Looking back - what was the hardest part of your journey when in the depths of it all?

I used to think resilience meant getting back up. Now I think it means knowing when to ask someone to help you up. That is the shift, and it took me longer to make it than I would like to admit.
Hope has changed too. Early on, hope felt like something fragile I had to protect at all costs, something that might shatter if I looked at it too directly, or talked about it too honestly, or let anyone else near it. I treated it like it was made of glass.
Now I understand that hope and grief can live in the same body at the same time. They are not opposites. You are not betraying one by feeling the other. You don’t have to choose, and you don’t have to pretend.

What feedback or listener response has surprised you most along the way?

The men.
I get messages from partners, husbands, boyfriends, who say they listen because it’s the only place they’ve found language for what their person is going through. That they finally feel like they understand something they couldn’t find words for. That surprised me at first. Now it makes complete sense.
Infertility isolates everyone in the relationship, not just the person whose body is being monitored. Partners grieve too. They are frightened too. They are holding things they have nowhere to put. The fact that the podcast gave language to people who didn’t think it was made for them, that is the response that still catches me off guard, every time.

What are some common emotional needs you see in the community that often go unspoken or unsupported?

Permission to stop. There is so much language in this space about fighting, pushing through, never giving up, and while that is valid, it quietly implies that stopping is failure. It isn’t. Sometimes the most courageous thing a person can do is say: this is enough for me right now. That decision deserves language and support, not silence.
The other one is identity. Fertility treatment can reduce you, slowly, thoroughly, to your reproductive function. You become a patient. A file. A set of results. People need to be reminded, regularly and genuinely, that they are a whole human being inside the process. Not just someone waiting for a result that will tell them who they get to be next.

Looking back, what’s one piece of advice you’d give to the Cassie who first started her fertility and IVF journey?

Support is not only for when you’re falling apart.
I waited until I was genuinely struggling before I reached for help, as if I needed to earn it, as if I had to prove the hardness before I was allowed to ask for relief. I was very good at the process and very lost inside it, and those two things coexisted for a long time without anyone, including me, noticing.
I’d tell her: you can ask for support when you’re coping perfectly well. Coping efficiently is not the same as being okay. You don’t have to earn the right to be held through this. You’re allowed to ask for that from the very beginning.   

Why is education and open conversation around women’s health, fertility, and the nervous system so important to you?? 

Fiercely Infertile started as a community and a podcast, born out of loneliness and a journalist’s conviction that silence is always a story worth breaking. It has grown into something I couldn’t have mapped at the beginning, which is exactly how the best things tend to work. We host lunches, brunches, guest speakers, blogs and so much more.
I’m now a consumer panellist with the Women and Infants Research Foundation, which means lived experience is literally in the room when research and service design decisions are being made. That matters enormously to me. I also recently keynoted the Perinatal Society of Australia and New Zealand Annual Congress  - standing on a stage in front of some of the country’s leading obstetricians, neonatologists, and researchers, and making a case for what cannot be measured. That felt like the work finding its fullest expression so far.

The podcast continues. The community continues. And I keep saying yes to rooms I think need to hear this perspective - because lived experience belongs in those rooms, and someone has to walk in and say so.

LISTEN to the 'What To Expect When You're Injecting' Podcast episode I did with Cassie.