Our transfer day. There’s so much build up to these “major” moments that are catalysts for possible life changing events. It’s wild how lacklustre the experience is and how uneventful it is after the fact. More waiting.
The hardest part of IVF is the waiting game. The complete unknown and it feels like every appointment is one where you’ll hold your breath. Maybe for 10 mins, maybe for 2 weeks. The lack of control you have over your actual body and its responses can be very frustrating and discouraging. It takes a lot of getting used to, especially for control freak me.
We went into the clinic locally this time. And this was the first time until now that we had actually seen our doctor’s face. We had only spoken to him twice in 6 months. A different doctor did the last transfer and our retrieval.
The local clinic where we live is lacklustre. For how much money you toss into IVF out of pocket, you’d expect more from the digs. It felt like going into an abandoned office building when we ventured into this part of our clinic. Until now, I had only been in the monitoring rooms – also lacklustre but pretty generic with dim lighting so not as shocking.
This transfer threw me for a loop initially. We walked into a waiting area, and I had asked for Ativan again because I didn’t know how my body would react to the catheter. Better safe than risking major uterus cramping. I went in early like they asked but they never passed the message along that I was waiting to take the medication in office (thanks receptionist). So they pushed our transfer back 20 minutes and bumped the next person into our spot. The kicker… they had the same birthday as me. Flash back to the 800 times they verify your embryo is yours using the birthday. Well, I got super worried they’d mix us up due to the schedule change, and the same birthday. Stress isn’t fun when you’re about to meet your embryo. I reiterated that I was worried about a mix up to every single person I spoke to after that. All I can say is speak up! Advocate, advocate, advocate.
The meds kicked in and I got changed into my pantsless getup while my husband donned his white space suit and we were escorted into the transfer room. This time, instead of an operating room it was a cramped clinic office with barely any room to roll the equipment around. The radio was playing in the background. We met the doctor and in no time it was done. I didn’t feel much besides the speculum. We got our little ultrasound photo, I got dressed and we departed.
My husband went back to work for the day and I took it easy. It was February 1, 2023.
I’ll get into more about chronic testing and testing culture one day, but let’s just say until now I was more than slightly OCD about testing. February marked 13 months of trying. 13 months of two week waits, testing, disappointment. It had been 9 months since my chemical pregnancy. Since my last positive test. I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to wait SEVEN days before I caved and got the urge to test.
On day 6 I started feeling some stuff, but after so many failed months of trying and ghost symptoms for absolutely no reason, I learned I couldn’t trust my body to indicate either way. I did get some pretty awful back pain on day 6, which would be the equivalent of 11dpo for those trying unassisted. The pain persisted and I had a gut feeling. I couldn’t wait any longer. Not even the two days until my beta blood work.
It was positive!!!! And not super faintly positive squinter like before. It was actually positive. I was soooo very cautious because I knew how much my heart broke last time around. I probably took 10 tests that day. All. Were. Positive. I was pregnant. It worked.
My beta blood work was scheduled for day 9, but I couldn’t wait so I went on day 8. It was within the minimum levels they had hoped for (they look for 50 on day 9, I was 46 on day 8). I went back two days after that and it had more than doubled to 108. Heck yessss!
I continued testing a couple of times a day, eventually upgrading from my crappy Amazon pee sticks to the fancy first response tests. I tracked my progression day to day to make sure my levels were getting darker, and they did continually.
I was so cautious. Could this really be happening? My brain and heart couldn’t believe it but my eyes were seeing it. I got a “dye stealer” on day 12 after transfer (when the test line is darker than the control line). This eased my mind substantially.
Now, the hardest wait of all – the 7 week ultrasound. 3 weeks of torture were ahead of us. I repeated cheesy mantras such as “my body accepts this pregnancy”, kept my feet warm and stopped eating foods I wasn’t allowed in pregnancy. I reminded myself every hour of every day that I was still pregnant and we were so very lucky. I stocked up on pregnancy books, just in case. I ordered a pregnancy pillow and welcomed my first small bouts of nausea. I also got to continue those wonderful suppositories and PIO injections.
This was finally happening.