And although I sort of thought I knew that it wasn’t going to happen this time, somehow it’s worse to get what seems like a period just six days after the transfer. I know, I know, I always said that nothing means anything and you can, it seems, still get your period and be pregnant. But this hasn’t happened before, and while obviously there’s a fraction of a sliver of me that thinks that might be a positive thing, most of me thinks that, as the clinic nurse told me, “it’s probably your body expelling the lining because it doesn’t need it.”

And that’s definitely worse than before. Because before, I basically had no symptoms throughout the two week wait (well I had a bit of spotting but I decided not to worry about that) and that absence of symptoms was some sort of blissful ignorance, it was a type of suspended animation, it wasn’t categorically one thing or another. And yes of course getting the negative blood test results for the pregnancy was miserable, but it wasn’t like this.

It wasn’t that feeling you get every time you go the loo and see blood and flush it away. A sense that literally feels like the hope is dripping out of you. And I’m sorry if this is too graphic for some of you. But actually I’m not. Because this is what it’s like. And if you’ve been there, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. And if you’re reading this and you don’t want to know, well there are other places on the internet you can go where they will talk euphemistically about “loss” and things “not being right” and “next time, hun”.

I know I’m not always going to feel like this. I know that when I know definitively what’s gone on and can make a plan for the next steps, and when I’ve seen my boyfriend (who has said ALL the right things on the phone, but that’s no substitute for actually having his arms around me and snotting into his chest — yes, I know, what can I say, he’s a lucky man) and had a proper chat with him, that I will feel better, but right now, if I’m honest, it’s all a bit shit. About as shit as finding out that of the 14 eggs you froze only one made an embryo. About as shit as finding out that you didn’t get a single embryo from a cycle of IVF. In the great scheme of things, today counts as a bad day.

And the worst thing is that I know my reaction to this is not just about the bleeding, not just about the fact that I’m probably not pregnant again, it’s partly about all the things that quiet voice was grumbling, but it’s also about what this means, what it represents, the bigger picture.

– It’s about what I do next and whether I have the energy to keep going, let alone the financial resources.
– It’s about what this means for my relationship and whether a man who was happy to let me get on with trying to get pregnant by someone else because it was the legacy of something I started before I met him will feel the same if I want to carry on with that route.
– It’s about if I carry on, where I go to do it because I can’t help feeling I’ve come to the end of the road with my clinic. That it would be like doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different result. And that at the very least I need a second opinion, a third opinion, or someone to very gently tell me that I need to stop because this isn’t going to happen like this the way I wanted it to.
– It’s about what happens if he’s not OK with me continuing with the IVF and what all that means, and whether three months into our relationship we actually have a conversation about trying to become parents together when we don’t even live in the same city.

And right now that all just feels overwhelming, exhausting, and something I just wish was somebody else’s life, not mine.