Sometimes it’s hard to know what to write and when to write. When I’m at rock bottom there’s a part of me that wants to sit down and write, get it all out, rant and rave and also share the real emotions, not skim over the hard stuff lightly. But it’s also hard to summon the energy when you’re at those points – I think you use every drop you have to put on a smile and get on with life – especially around those who have no idea what’s going on for you.
Then there’s a part of me that wants to share the positive, wants to focus on how you pick yourself up and dust yourself off after hitting rock bottom. I hate feeling like a victim and sometimes that’s what I feel like this fertility journey is doing to me. Why me, why us, why, why, why? Because you don’t just see each part of your life in isolation, you live it as one big, crazy mess.
When we have to say goodbye to E on a weekend, when we don’t get to spend Christmas with him or go to his primary school graduation, when we fight battle after battle with his mum just so that we can spend time with him and be a part of his life, when a solicitor’s bill comes in for thousands of dollars, when things go wrong at the house, not just in threes but fours and fives and sixes, on the days when work seems like a joke but there’s no other jobs going and no way to step away from it with the financial burdens we have at the moment, you feel it all piling up on top of you. Then you throw in the injustices you see out there in the world, people suffering, children dying, murders of innocent people, war, starvation and so much pain and you just know that life is not fair and there is no logic, no reason to the bad things that happen to good people.
I am struggling with the two extremes at the moment, the anger and pain and the victim feeling of ‘IT’S NOT FAIR!!!’ and the normal me, the one that lets myself cry and then looks for the positives, the plan for how to move forward. So I’ll just write and let both sides come through – because at the end of the day the real reason for writing this is to help me make sense of what’s in my head and my heart.
The dreaded two week wait (2WW) wasn’t as bad as what I thought it would be. We were counting down to Monday 22nd December when we’d head in for the pregnancy test – if we made it that far. Leading up to Christmas we were busy and it was easy to get distracted with all the different things on.
On the Monday following the transfer I went into the clinic for a blood test and that night started Crinone gel – which I would use twice a day for the duration of the 2WW. It wasn’t pleasant- each dose is in a new tube that you unwrap, insert up your vagina and then squeeze the gel out. Some women develop a lot of build-up which you either have to clean out or it comes out at random moments. I had a good laugh when one woman on the Facebook group described how she sneezed in the shower and a bouncy ball of old crinone gel popped out!
I was due for acupuncture that Friday which would have worked well seeing I’d cancelled my previous appointment being so busy at work and thinking I was going for a freeze all cycle anyway. Once again I got so caught up in the chaos of work that I actually forgot to turn up – I felt so horribly guilty for the practitioner and also hoped that it wouldn’t make a difference.
I managed to hold off doing a pregnancy test at home until day 6! The day after the transfer counts as day 1 – so on Sunday I was 1dp5dt or 1 day past 5 day transfer – a five day old embryo or blastocyst. All the official things I’d read said hcg isn’t detectable in your system until day 9, but I’d also seen women share positive home tests from days 5 onwards. I woke up crazy early on the Friday and just couldn’t get back to sleep, so I snuck into the ensuite, peed on a stick and then crept out to the lounge room so I didn’t wake J. I had tested a day or two after the transfer to make sure I wasn’t going to get a false positive from any medication like I had with the first IUI cycle and the stick came back completely negative so I knew any future positive results would be a real positive. Eventually I figured long enough had passed and I looked… and there was the faintest of faintest second pink line. You had to hold the stick in a certain light and it was so faint that if I hadn’t done a million tests before and known that a negative was never visible, I would have thought it could have just been an evaporative line. I wanted to run in and bounce on the bed to wake J up and show him but it was oh so faint and oh so crazy early I knew I couldn’t. When he did eventually wake up I showed him and he was quietly optimistic. Of course I couldn’t wait another couple of days to test again – they say that your hcg levels, which is what triggers a positive pregnancy test – should double every 48-72 hours in a viable pregnancy, which means you should notice the difference between tests every 2-3 days. I tested again that evening and the line was still faint but definitely there. I tested the next morning and the next evening. I kept the sticks and the 7d PM stick (tested in the evening on day 7) was a darker line, dark enough to photograph, to see without angling the stick in the right light and I started to let the excitement grow. I knew there was a risk that it could be a chemical pregnancy – where the embryo starts to implant and technically you’re pregnant, but for whatever reason it doesn’t continue to grow. I knew there was a risk that I could go on to miscarriage later on. But I wanted to hold on to this feeling. I wanted to BE PREGNANT. I wanted to think about the next 9 months and then afterwards, holding our baby. I wanted to think about the next 20 years with our child, our dream and feel like things were finally going our way. I wanted this to work.
The next morning the stick was so much fainter again and I felt a wave of heaviness wash over me – it wasn’t going to work, it was going to be a chemical pregnancy. But then I tested again that evening and it was darker again – not as dark as yesterday but darker than this morning. I told myself that I must be one of those women who tested better later in the day, I even found a study via Dr Google that showed higher rates of correct positive results with tests taken later in the day compared to the standard first thing in the morning test. I let myself get excited again and as we celebrated Christmas early with E and my family I let them know that things were looking good.
But the tests the next couple of days didn’t get darker – I told myself it was because we were still before day 9 – even when I went in for my day 9 blood test it would be less than 9 days after the transfer because of the time (transfer had been around 11am, blood test would be around 7.30am). My period still hadn’t arrived and I had a funny appetite – I didn’t feel like anything other than startchy/carby food. No meat, no fruit or veggies, just potatoes or bread.
I was happy, so happy that this might finally be working. When we found out that the sperm was unable to get into the egg to fertilise it but that we had one embryo to transfer we talked about how maybe this was all we needed. Maybe our problem all along had just been getting a fertilized egg, and now an embryo was already in there we’d be that lucky couple who has overcome our problem and falls pregnant on our first IVF cycle. I started to think how great it would be not to have to spend thousands of dollars on treatment and we could focus on saving up again before the baby came, before I went on maternity leave.
You tell yourself logically to be careful, you know it might not work, but your heart doesn’t always listen to your head and when you want something so bad you start to believe it.
Then on the Monday as I got ready for work and we drove in for the blood test I started to feel something tiny – it was so low down and so faint that I almost felt like I could be imagining it, but I prayed and prayed and prayed that it wasn’t period cramps. I felt horribly nervous as we drove in and j joked about how I shouldn’t be because I’d had so many blood tests, but we both knew we were nervous about the results of this one. The first time we’d made it this far… We agreed that when the clinic called I’d let it go to voicemail and then we’d listen together or call them back together. I missed the call completely because it came in just after 10am – so much earlier than usual so I headed out to the car park and J came out of his office so we could sit in the car and call them back.
Voicemail. Argh! The most frustrating thing as I left a message and then we sat… and waited… I tried again, I called the reception number but no answer, I waited and then called again. After sitting in the car for about half an hour we had to give up and head back in to work, but just as I sat down the phone rang so I raced outside and answered.
The test was positive… but my levels were so low it wasn’t looking good. Instead of coming back in a week I’d have to come back on the 24th – Christmas Eve – but when I suggested it was looking like a chemical pregnancy the nurse agreed. I messaged J and he met me in the car park again… I wanted to be brave but as soon as I started to speak I started to cry… I’m crying now even as I write this 2 days later…
It was a horrible day, whilst officially I guess I was 3 weeks and 2 days pregnant it wasn't going to last. We were both unsurprised but at the same time, illogically shocked and very, very heart broken. We left work early and sat on the couch crying in each other’s arms. I felt like a failure, I felt unwomanly, I was angry and I was so, so sad at times I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
The next morning I knew my period was on its way.
You can feel these little twinges, faint cramps low down and you know that it’s what should have been your baby slowly dying – ‘disintegrating’ and its heart breaking. For every line that you tell yourself and others that you’ll just ‘wait and see’ that at least ‘we made it this far for if we need to try again’ – deep down all you want is for this time to work, for us to have a break, a bit of good luck. I don’t want to have to do this again, I don’t want to have to pump by body full of medication, to be probed and poked and prodded, to have to wait almost holding your breath, to put your life on hold because really nothing else matters during that time.
I hate the term chemical pregnancy because it makes me feel as though it never was, as though all it was was some mixing of chemicals or hormones in my body but nothing real, nothing that should have found its way into our hearts. But this embryo was loved from the very day it was transferred inside of me. All the times J would touch my belly and ask ‘how are you going in there emby?’ or how I could lie in bed and picture a baby in our arms, a little boy starting school, even a sarcastic teenager. There is so much grief for what should have been but wasn’t.
We had our second blood test today and I saw the nurse beforehand. As soon as I saw that it was our nurse on duty I knew that I would cry and that’s what I didn’t want to do. We stepped into the office and the tears started – she’s such a beautiful, gentle person and she told me it was the chair, the crying chair. I don’t know how they deal with seeing so much pain on a regular basis. We talked about another cycle in the new year, I had the blood test and then around 10am got the call confirming what we already knew.
It’s hard heading into Christmas – and my birthday – with this grief in our hearts. Two years ago we celebrated Christmas on our own thinking it might be the last time. A week ago I thought maybe it finally would be the last time and now I wonder if it will be every year. If we will ever have ‘baby’s first Christmas’ and santa photos and cute family photos of anyone more than J, E and I.
We’re trying to hold on to the positives – we have a small trip away just for the two of us over new years and now I can drink wine and eat cheeses and prawns. I can focus on my health in the new year as we prepare for a new cycle and maybe with ICSI we’ll get a whole heap of embryos so I don’t have to do a full cycle again. I know I have so much to be grateful for – most especially the man by my side, who holds me while I sobs, who isn’t afraid to let me see his own tears, who shares this burden with me. But we are hurting…
Then there’s a part of me that wants to share the positive, wants to focus on how you pick yourself up and dust yourself off after hitting rock bottom. I hate feeling like a victim and sometimes that’s what I feel like this fertility journey is doing to me. Why me, why us, why, why, why? Because you don’t just see each part of your life in isolation, you live it as one big, crazy mess.
When we have to say goodbye to E on a weekend, when we don’t get to spend Christmas with him or go to his primary school graduation, when we fight battle after battle with his mum just so that we can spend time with him and be a part of his life, when a solicitor’s bill comes in for thousands of dollars, when things go wrong at the house, not just in threes but fours and fives and sixes, on the days when work seems like a joke but there’s no other jobs going and no way to step away from it with the financial burdens we have at the moment, you feel it all piling up on top of you. Then you throw in the injustices you see out there in the world, people suffering, children dying, murders of innocent people, war, starvation and so much pain and you just know that life is not fair and there is no logic, no reason to the bad things that happen to good people.
I am struggling with the two extremes at the moment, the anger and pain and the victim feeling of ‘IT’S NOT FAIR!!!’ and the normal me, the one that lets myself cry and then looks for the positives, the plan for how to move forward. So I’ll just write and let both sides come through – because at the end of the day the real reason for writing this is to help me make sense of what’s in my head and my heart.
The dreaded two week wait (2WW) wasn’t as bad as what I thought it would be. We were counting down to Monday 22nd December when we’d head in for the pregnancy test – if we made it that far. Leading up to Christmas we were busy and it was easy to get distracted with all the different things on.
On the Monday following the transfer I went into the clinic for a blood test and that night started Crinone gel – which I would use twice a day for the duration of the 2WW. It wasn’t pleasant- each dose is in a new tube that you unwrap, insert up your vagina and then squeeze the gel out. Some women develop a lot of build-up which you either have to clean out or it comes out at random moments. I had a good laugh when one woman on the Facebook group described how she sneezed in the shower and a bouncy ball of old crinone gel popped out!
I was due for acupuncture that Friday which would have worked well seeing I’d cancelled my previous appointment being so busy at work and thinking I was going for a freeze all cycle anyway. Once again I got so caught up in the chaos of work that I actually forgot to turn up – I felt so horribly guilty for the practitioner and also hoped that it wouldn’t make a difference.
I managed to hold off doing a pregnancy test at home until day 6! The day after the transfer counts as day 1 – so on Sunday I was 1dp5dt or 1 day past 5 day transfer – a five day old embryo or blastocyst. All the official things I’d read said hcg isn’t detectable in your system until day 9, but I’d also seen women share positive home tests from days 5 onwards. I woke up crazy early on the Friday and just couldn’t get back to sleep, so I snuck into the ensuite, peed on a stick and then crept out to the lounge room so I didn’t wake J. I had tested a day or two after the transfer to make sure I wasn’t going to get a false positive from any medication like I had with the first IUI cycle and the stick came back completely negative so I knew any future positive results would be a real positive. Eventually I figured long enough had passed and I looked… and there was the faintest of faintest second pink line. You had to hold the stick in a certain light and it was so faint that if I hadn’t done a million tests before and known that a negative was never visible, I would have thought it could have just been an evaporative line. I wanted to run in and bounce on the bed to wake J up and show him but it was oh so faint and oh so crazy early I knew I couldn’t. When he did eventually wake up I showed him and he was quietly optimistic. Of course I couldn’t wait another couple of days to test again – they say that your hcg levels, which is what triggers a positive pregnancy test – should double every 48-72 hours in a viable pregnancy, which means you should notice the difference between tests every 2-3 days. I tested again that evening and the line was still faint but definitely there. I tested the next morning and the next evening. I kept the sticks and the 7d PM stick (tested in the evening on day 7) was a darker line, dark enough to photograph, to see without angling the stick in the right light and I started to let the excitement grow. I knew there was a risk that it could be a chemical pregnancy – where the embryo starts to implant and technically you’re pregnant, but for whatever reason it doesn’t continue to grow. I knew there was a risk that I could go on to miscarriage later on. But I wanted to hold on to this feeling. I wanted to BE PREGNANT. I wanted to think about the next 9 months and then afterwards, holding our baby. I wanted to think about the next 20 years with our child, our dream and feel like things were finally going our way. I wanted this to work.
The next morning the stick was so much fainter again and I felt a wave of heaviness wash over me – it wasn’t going to work, it was going to be a chemical pregnancy. But then I tested again that evening and it was darker again – not as dark as yesterday but darker than this morning. I told myself that I must be one of those women who tested better later in the day, I even found a study via Dr Google that showed higher rates of correct positive results with tests taken later in the day compared to the standard first thing in the morning test. I let myself get excited again and as we celebrated Christmas early with E and my family I let them know that things were looking good.
But the tests the next couple of days didn’t get darker – I told myself it was because we were still before day 9 – even when I went in for my day 9 blood test it would be less than 9 days after the transfer because of the time (transfer had been around 11am, blood test would be around 7.30am). My period still hadn’t arrived and I had a funny appetite – I didn’t feel like anything other than startchy/carby food. No meat, no fruit or veggies, just potatoes or bread.
I was happy, so happy that this might finally be working. When we found out that the sperm was unable to get into the egg to fertilise it but that we had one embryo to transfer we talked about how maybe this was all we needed. Maybe our problem all along had just been getting a fertilized egg, and now an embryo was already in there we’d be that lucky couple who has overcome our problem and falls pregnant on our first IVF cycle. I started to think how great it would be not to have to spend thousands of dollars on treatment and we could focus on saving up again before the baby came, before I went on maternity leave.
You tell yourself logically to be careful, you know it might not work, but your heart doesn’t always listen to your head and when you want something so bad you start to believe it.
Then on the Monday as I got ready for work and we drove in for the blood test I started to feel something tiny – it was so low down and so faint that I almost felt like I could be imagining it, but I prayed and prayed and prayed that it wasn’t period cramps. I felt horribly nervous as we drove in and j joked about how I shouldn’t be because I’d had so many blood tests, but we both knew we were nervous about the results of this one. The first time we’d made it this far… We agreed that when the clinic called I’d let it go to voicemail and then we’d listen together or call them back together. I missed the call completely because it came in just after 10am – so much earlier than usual so I headed out to the car park and J came out of his office so we could sit in the car and call them back.
Voicemail. Argh! The most frustrating thing as I left a message and then we sat… and waited… I tried again, I called the reception number but no answer, I waited and then called again. After sitting in the car for about half an hour we had to give up and head back in to work, but just as I sat down the phone rang so I raced outside and answered.
The test was positive… but my levels were so low it wasn’t looking good. Instead of coming back in a week I’d have to come back on the 24th – Christmas Eve – but when I suggested it was looking like a chemical pregnancy the nurse agreed. I messaged J and he met me in the car park again… I wanted to be brave but as soon as I started to speak I started to cry… I’m crying now even as I write this 2 days later…
It was a horrible day, whilst officially I guess I was 3 weeks and 2 days pregnant it wasn't going to last. We were both unsurprised but at the same time, illogically shocked and very, very heart broken. We left work early and sat on the couch crying in each other’s arms. I felt like a failure, I felt unwomanly, I was angry and I was so, so sad at times I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
The next morning I knew my period was on its way.
You can feel these little twinges, faint cramps low down and you know that it’s what should have been your baby slowly dying – ‘disintegrating’ and its heart breaking. For every line that you tell yourself and others that you’ll just ‘wait and see’ that at least ‘we made it this far for if we need to try again’ – deep down all you want is for this time to work, for us to have a break, a bit of good luck. I don’t want to have to do this again, I don’t want to have to pump by body full of medication, to be probed and poked and prodded, to have to wait almost holding your breath, to put your life on hold because really nothing else matters during that time.
I hate the term chemical pregnancy because it makes me feel as though it never was, as though all it was was some mixing of chemicals or hormones in my body but nothing real, nothing that should have found its way into our hearts. But this embryo was loved from the very day it was transferred inside of me. All the times J would touch my belly and ask ‘how are you going in there emby?’ or how I could lie in bed and picture a baby in our arms, a little boy starting school, even a sarcastic teenager. There is so much grief for what should have been but wasn’t.
We had our second blood test today and I saw the nurse beforehand. As soon as I saw that it was our nurse on duty I knew that I would cry and that’s what I didn’t want to do. We stepped into the office and the tears started – she’s such a beautiful, gentle person and she told me it was the chair, the crying chair. I don’t know how they deal with seeing so much pain on a regular basis. We talked about another cycle in the new year, I had the blood test and then around 10am got the call confirming what we already knew.
It’s hard heading into Christmas – and my birthday – with this grief in our hearts. Two years ago we celebrated Christmas on our own thinking it might be the last time. A week ago I thought maybe it finally would be the last time and now I wonder if it will be every year. If we will ever have ‘baby’s first Christmas’ and santa photos and cute family photos of anyone more than J, E and I.
We’re trying to hold on to the positives – we have a small trip away just for the two of us over new years and now I can drink wine and eat cheeses and prawns. I can focus on my health in the new year as we prepare for a new cycle and maybe with ICSI we’ll get a whole heap of embryos so I don’t have to do a full cycle again. I know I have so much to be grateful for – most especially the man by my side, who holds me while I sobs, who isn’t afraid to let me see his own tears, who shares this burden with me. But we are hurting…