Waiting … …

There has been a bit of a lull in activity since we got our results… You find this when you are trying for a baby. There are a lot of long silences between punctuated moments. Good and bad. Those times where nothing is happening and you are just waiting for the next milestone. That for me this time around will be my Hysteroscopy. I don’t have a date yet. When I am in the first two weeks of my cycle waiting becomes much more about normal life. I do everything I need to, work rest and play quite effectively. I sometimes have such a content time I forget about the baby situation at all. Then the hormones rev up. It renders my brain useless at some points, ravaged by the pressure to have a baby by my yearning body.

The worst wait I ever had mentally and emotionally was the 2-week wait after embryo transfer on our first, only and very successful round of IVF. I had prepared myself to get to the transfer date, but not beyond. It hit me about 24 hours after the transfer had taken place. The first 24 hours I lay in bed watching movies, surrounded by family bring me tea and flowers and amazing balloons that said 10/4, the numbers of the embryos transferred and the sign off my Dad used when we were little. I was very happy. These numbers were a sign. Everything was going to be okay. I was so wrong. After that first 24 hours, the anxiety monster set in. I didn’t feel pregnant at all. It hadn’t worked. I would wait two weeks and nothing would have happened. I KNEW in my head that I wasn’t pregnant. My body felt the least pregnant it had ever been. The next 48 hours were awful. I didn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat or drink. Even if I had been pregnant I felt sure that all of this stress would have made the babies stay away, so I beat myself up for not being able to control my feelings and stay positive!

And then something happened. It was roughly a week after transfer. We had gone to the farm shop and my husband had bought, as his heritage requires, his body weight in pork scratchings and pie. As he passed his wares to me though our truck window, a heavenly waft of pork pie hit me.

Now I might eat on occasion the peppery pie innards. This is the prize for me. I have never been a fan of anything wrapped in pastry or batter or breadcrumbs. I would rather have the meat or even ring of soft onion inside. Even when we were little it was well known that I would have the inside of things and my sister preferred the outside. A match made in heaven. But that day, the smell of spicy pork and the buttery pastry hit me. By the time my husband had got in the other side I had devoured half of it. “Baybbbbeee!” He looks at me shocked. I told my sister. “You’re pregnant.” she said. To be totally fair to my sister in any of my blogs I write that feature you may as well take it as read that she is always right. “Jayney, you are definitely pregnant,” she laughed, and told me not to worry any longer. After this incident, there were some other demolitions during those first few weeks including the most amazing gourmet burger I have ever tasted which latest all of 5 minutes in my hands.

So now just over a week from transfer I started to relax a little more but another week until my test at the clinic still seemed so far away, so, and I don’t suggest in anyway this was a good or sensible thing to do, I did a pregnancy test. We had used an egg donor so I knew I wouldn’t get any feedback on the test from any earlier egg retrieval and if it was negative I would tell myself it was too soon to test. But at this stage I had started to really believe this could be true.  I called Andy up to the bathroom only once I had done it…. I was pregnant. The much-required line was feint but it was definitely there. I tested again two days later. The line was getting stronger in colour.

My hardest wait was over, I was really pregnant.