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Waiting…

After the embryo transfer, there is about a ten day wait before a pregnancy test is likely to show anything.

I don’t have a clue whether it worked or not.

It’s hard not to be constantly on the lookout for potential symptoms. Every twitch, every feeling whatsoever suddenly gains a possible significance.

After a few days, my breasts are suddenly feeling very swollen and painful. That leaves me excited at first, because boobs = pregnant, right? But after some research I figure out it’s more likely to be all the hormones I’m taking that are causing it than it being a proper pregnancy sign.

On another day, I feel cramps. That could mean implantation, that the little embryo is making itself right at home. Or it could mean nothing at all.

The day after that it’s a spinny feeling in my head. But then that goes again too.

So I dutifully swallow all the pills and take all the medication as directed, ten items a day, and time crawls on.

Operation snowflake: The frozen embryo transfer

It’s a beautiful morning in London. It startlingly feels like spring even though it’s only February.

We slowly make our way towards St. Paul’s cathedral. I promised my grandmother we would go in, so we do, and I even think a little prayer. Neither Jo or myself are religious at all, but on a day like this I feel like we can go with a ‘just in case’, right?

We find the Create clinic (which is just opposite St. Paul’s), and we are checked in quickly. Both of us need to change into gowns, which is a bit like playing dress-up, and we giggle nervously trying to sort out various straps and the plastic bits that go over our feet and heads.

Then the nurse scans my abdomen to check whether my bladder is full enough for the procedure. …and it isn’t!(I’m sorry! I was nervous! I had to have a pee!)

She sends me back to drink more water, so Jo and I sit in the little curtained off area and wait. We take some pictures. We chat. I drink my cups of water.

Back when we heard how many embryos we had, we nicknamed them all. The one they’re transferring today is a 4AB embryo, named ‘Shiva’ by Jo. We ask the nurse whether there will be a chance to get a picture of little Shiva, and she brings it to us, a print-off of this round, cellular blastocyst. It looks nothing like a baby of course, but I love the thought that it might become one some day and showing them the earliest picture ever taken of them * g *

Eventually, I am called back in, scanned again, and my bladder is declared full enough to start.

The hormone crazies

Progesterone makes me feel angry.

I always assumed if I would have any mood swings at all during this process, it would be the kind where I am tearing up over a picture of a kitten one minute, and desperately stuffing my face with ice cream the next. I thought it would be messy emotion-wise, but generally harmless; all soppy stories and The Feels, maybe being a bit snappish when I can’t have as much coffee as I’d like or when I hate how bloated I look.

Instead, I feel like I want to commit murder.

I am self-aware enough not to actually do anything too horrible, but the rage is fierce this cycle. I am on ten items of medication a day, that alone requires a lot of planning and keeping track of each moment, I have zero shits left to give about anything else!

Poor Jo has attempted to hug me more than once only to hear an absolute ‘NO’. I despise this latest addition in medication and can’t help but be vocal about it. This all SUCKS! * waves a fist *

But is it at least worth it?

FET treatment consultation

We decided to continue with our London clinic, so it’s off to London to visit the ABC IVF clinic once again.

It’s such familiar territory by now. We greet the staff as we come in, take a seat in the waiting room, help ourselves to some water from the cooler, make toilet trips (still scarred by the ‘have you emptied your bladder’ shouting, I now visit the bathroom immediately on arrival!).

We don’t have to wait long and get to see “our” consultant again as well, which is nice.

Happy New Year’s are exchanged, we talk about how I have been feeling this past month, and then it’s scan time.

It barely fazes me anymore to undress and go lie down on the little bench. Mainly I am glad to get the scan and to find out what is happening with my body. Legs up in the stirrups and off we go!

What’s next?

Christmas and New Year’s are over, I am healed from the OHSS and egg collection surgery, and we’re eager to keep on going!

But what comes next exactly?

If I wouldn’t have gotten sick, they would have done a ‘fresh transfer’ of an embryo a few days after the egg collection surgery, and I might have been 1.5 months pregnant by now. I’m not, which feels fine most of the time, but sometimes it still hits me what could have been. I know it was naive to hope for it to go that perfectly, but of course we had hoped for exactly that – all the luck in the world…

All of our embryos were frozen instead and now it’s all about getting my body healthy and ready to be a good home for one of them. Once I am, and at the right point of my cycle, then they’ll defrost one of the embryos (I can’t help but imagine them doing this in a microwave!) and put it back.

This means that we need more appointments, more trips into London, and more money.