I’m sure it can’t just be me that thinks like this, but I do so often think about the lives I could have been living if luck or decisions had gone another way. If the morning after pill hadn’t worked when I was 19… If I’d gone on to marry S… If I’d got pregnant with my first IVF cycle – all these parallel lives that I’m not living, but so nearly did.

And I’ve never had such an acute sense of that as I do right now. Because (and I said this wasn’t going to be a dating blog, and it’s not, but this is kind of relevant to all the pregnancy stuff) I’ve met someone.

It’s ridiculously early days. I have no idea if it will work out. But right now, he’s making me really happy. He doesn’t live in London, which makes things slightly more complicated, but we’re constantly messaging, and we actually speak on the phone several times a week (and dear god, if you’ve not dated in the last ten years you won’t have any understanding of quite what a seismic thing Speaking On The Phone is in today’s dating culture, trust me, it’s a big deal.)

He also doesn’t yet know about all this.

To my mind, right now, there’s nothing to tell.

But in the space of 48 hours, I’m going to find out whether or not I’m pregnant. And I’m going to see him. (To add irony and another layer of “you literally couldn’t make this shit up” to things, we’d planned, weeks before I knew about the transfer and anything else, to have dinner in a sushi restaurant. A sushi restaurant. When I might or might not be pregnant. Honestly.) And that’s why I can’t do anything apart from take things one day at a time. Because when I think about the permutations of what might happen, there are too many hypotheticals, too many known unknowns. So absolutely the only way to proceed is one day at a time.

I want more than anything to hear the nurse telling me that my blood test was positive, that it’s worked, that I’m pregnant. But if that doesn’t happen…. well, I will undoubtedly have a big old snotfest and question why life is so unfair, and wonder why I can’t get a break, and then wonder whether I’m being a total moron for trying so hard to make something happen. But then I’ll remember that I’ve got a date with someone who seems genuinely interested in me, who I know is funny, who seems kind and thoughtful…

And, as I’ve told the splodge of white, if in some weird pact with the devil or some pagan deity, I was forced to choose between that splodge of white becoming my baby, and him, I know without hesitation which I’d choose. (It would be the baby every time. Obviously. Can’t really believe I had to point that out, but there you go — just in case you hadn’t figured it out via the years of my life and the thousands of pounds of my income spent on trying to get pregnant. Baby. Every time.) But if I can’t have the baby yet, if this time isn’t the time that it works, I’ll take that date over no date.

(And please let’s just will/hope/pray to whatever you believe in that I don’t end up with a double whammy of a negative pregnancy test and a cancelled date, or date that goes badly, because that might just tip me over the edge for good.)