Am I supposed to take the two week wait off work? Manager has started asking what all the "appointments" are for

Transfer is booked for next Wednesday and I have suddenly realised I have no plan for the fortnight afterwards.

I have already burned a lot of goodwill getting to the scans, which were all at 7.30am and one of which ran so late I missed a meeting I had moved twice. My manager is not unkind but he has started saying "another appointment?" in a particular voice, and last week he asked outright whether everything was alright health wise. I said yes and changed the subject and then sat in the car park feeling like a liar.

So two questions really. Do people take the two week wait off work, or is that overkill? And how much do you tell them? I do not want to say the word IVF at work because I do not want to be asked how it went by someone at the coffee machine, but I am also finding it harder and harder to keep inventing dentist appointments.

I have done it both ways and I would not take the whole fortnight off again.

Cycle two I took ten days and it was the longest ten days of my life. Nothing to do but notice my own body. By day five I was googling symptoms hourly. Cycle four I worked normally, took the transfer day and the day after off, and honestly the distraction of a busy Tuesday was medicine. Everyone is different, but "empty diary" and "restful" are not the same thing, and I wish somebody had told me that.

On telling people: I told one person, not my manager, my closest colleague, and got her to cover the "is Gemma alright" questions for me. Best decision of the whole cycle.

I went the other way and told HR properly, and I do not regret it, though it was a horrible half hour.

What made it bearable was deciding in advance exactly what I was going to say and where the line was. I said I was having fertility treatment, that it would mean some early appointments over a few weeks, and that I would rather not discuss it beyond that. They wrote it down, my absences stopped being a mystery, and nobody at the coffee machine ever knew. There is a version of telling that is not the same as being public about it.

Louise, this one comes up more than almost anything else in my inbox, so let me answer both halves properly.

There is no medical requirement to take the two week wait off work. Normal activity, including going to work, does not reduce your chance, so this is a question about what you can bear rather than what is safe. In my three rounds I did it both ways and I ended up in gemma's camp: I found being at work easier than being alone with the fortnight, with the exception of the day of transfer and the day of the test, which I would always protect if I could. The one to watch is a job that is physically punishing or where you cannot step away for five minutes when it gets to you. If that is yours, the calculation is different.

On what to tell them, the framing I found useful is that you are choosing who holds the information, not whether to be honest. You can tell one person and not the department. You can tell HR and not your team. You can say "I am having medical treatment that involves a course of hospital appointments over the next few weeks" without ever saying the word IVF, and that sentence is complete and true and nobody is entitled to more. What is worth checking, quietly and early, is whether your employer has a fertility policy, because a surprising number now do, and it tends to sit somewhere unglamorous on the intranet rather than being announced. Time off arrangements for medical appointments vary by employer and by country, so it is worth knowing your own terms before you negotiate. Our guide to fertility treatment and work goes through this in more detail, and the two-week wait covers what the fortnight itself is actually like.

The bit I would gently push back on is the dentist appointments. Not for moral reasons, for stamina reasons: keeping a cover story running takes energy you are going to want for other things. That was true for me by round two.

Only advice I have is do not book anything you cannot cancel for test day. I had a big presentation the morning after mine and I have no memory of giving it.

Thank you all. Plan is: transfer day and the following day booked as leave, test day booked as leave, everything in between worked as normal, and I am going to tell one colleague and nobody else.

Also went looking on the intranet and there is in fact a fertility treatment policy, dated last year, which nobody has ever mentioned to me. Two paid days for procedures. I have worked there six years.

That last line is grimly familiar. Ours had one too, buried under wellbeing. Worth everyone here having a look, even if you never use it, because knowing it exists changes how the conversation with a manager feels.