In One Basket

My last embryo didn’t make it to freeze – he stopped developing at the six cell stage and never started back up.  All of our eggs are, officially, in my basket.

While I’m a little sad for the baby who will never exist, I’m mostly ok with it.  If one of my embryos wasn’t going to make it, I’d rather it be the one they didn’t transfer than one of the two they did.  And, since they transferred the strongest embryos, I don’t think it really says anything about the maybe-babies currently in my uterus.  Eggbert had already grown beyond the stage where this one stopped developing, so that seems promising.  Frankenstein was at the same stage, so fingers crossed for him (I’m hoping it wasn’t anything to do with the rescue ICSI).

And, as insensitive as this sounds, if that embryo wasn’t strong, I’m glad it stopped developing before it got frozen.  Freezing is the one thing not covered by our insurance (which seems crazy – it saves them money in the long run!), so freezing an embryo would cost us almost as much as a fresh cycle.  Freezing more than one embryos would have cost double!  I’d still be happy to do it for the time and stress it would save if we had good embryos to freeze, but I wouldn’t want to pay for freezing, go through a frozen cycle, and then not have it work because the embryo wasn’t very good.  Now I understand why my clinic only freezes blastocysts.

The news about my embryo is the only contact I’ve had with my clinic since my transfer Monday, and the last contact I’ll have until my pregnancy test just before the end of the year.  As I told my nurse, it’s all starting to feel a little bit like a dream.  Soon the only physical reminder I will have of everything we just went through is the wet-chalk residue from my progesterone suppositories in my underwear: all of my scabs have healed, and even my most stubborn bruise has almost disappeared.  My ovaries feel back to normal.  After a day of bed rest and a couple of days of taking it easy I’m almost back to my usual activity, minus exercise (although I’m careful about lifting things, make Henry walk the dog, and try to limit my walks up and down the stairs).  Sometimes I have to remind myself it happened.

Really and truly, the only thing left to do is hope.  Hope during an IVF cycle is such a strange thing; it’s like constantly trying to balance on a see-saw.  Too much towards pessimism, and you feel the need to remind yourself to “think positive!”  Too much towards optimism, and you have to remind yourself that it might not work.  But soon something WILL happen – that see-saw will come down on one side of the other.  I realized recently that this is the one thing I find the hardest to believe, even though it’s the one thing guaranteed to happen.  I don’t expect it to work or not work; I just expect to be in limbo forever.  That definitive answer – YES or NO – seems so unlikely.

And yet… I feel cautiously optimistic.  I have nothing to base that hope on besides a vague soreness in my uterus that seems to be lasting longer than it should, but it’s there.  I’m trying not to get too carried away – misplaced optimism has never done me any favors before – but for now I’m enjoying it.

Actually, I lie: I do have two signs from the universe to base my hope on.  First, this morning, I came across this gallery of really creepy twin portraits. As soon as I opened it up, I thought, “Yup.  Definitely having twins now.  And they’re going to be terrifying.”

Second, for the first time ever, Henry and I agreed that we liked the same girl’s name. (No, I’m not going to share it).  Sure, I came across it while looking at baby names so you could argue that it’s not so much a sign as a product of my diligent searching, but really – in our three years of dating and nearly three years of marriage, we have never agreed on a girl name.  We, on paper, like the same things - names that are names; names that are spelled correctly; names with some sort of connection to us; names that aren’t on any “most popular” lists – and we each have a few names we like individually. But until last night we have never come together and said “Yes, this is a name that I would be happy for my daughter to have.” If we can beat the odds to find a name that we can agree on, that positive pregnancy test should be no problem.