I’ve been thinking this for quite a long time — in fact I feel like I probably wrote about it when I was freezing my eggs — but this whole thing from start to finish is, if you think about it, totally fucking insane. I have — to date — paid out the best part of £20,000 — twenty GRAND! And what do I have to show for it? I have taken SO MUCH on trust.

Seriously, think about it. Normally when you have medical treatment it’s because you’re ill, or you want to change something. But when I had my eggs frozen, all I had to show for it was a load of bruises where I’d injected myself with hormones. I took it on trust that those shapes and blurs on the screen were, as they said, follicles in my ovaries; that when they sedated me, they did actually manage to retrieve the number of eggs that they said they had; that they’d managed to successfully freeze them; that they’d labelled them properly with my name, you know, all that sort of thing.

(And can I just be clear at this point that I’m not casting aspersions on the integrity of my clinic or anyone working there, and I’m not REALLY doubting whether any of this stuff happened — at least most of the time I’m not — it’s just really weird when you (over) think about it.)

But it doesn’t stop there. I have, as I told a friend the other day “spunked about a grand on some jizz.” (Sorry, I know, I’m terribly crude, but one needs to be able to see the funny side of this.) And again, I have nothing to show for it. I’ve taken it on trust that the donor is who they say he is; that they collected his sample in a vial they labelled properly and didn’t mix up with someone else; that they picked the right vial out of the freezer and sent it to the right clinic.

And then, that they will actually defrost the right eggs and the right sperm, and fertilise them properly, and not mix them up with some other gametes, and that they will actually put an embryo in when they say they will and…and…and….

And if social services are reading this then, if I ever do get pregnant, they will be intervening before my first scan to ensure that this mad, delusional, paranoid woman doesn’t become a mother.

But you know what I mean, right? It’s not just me, right? You can SEE how if you think about it too much, you can end up crawling down these weird mental cul-de-sacs, right?