It was John Lennon who apparently said that “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans” and Woody Allen’s credited with saying “If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans” — even though my suspicion is that Jewish grandmothers have been saying it for millennia. Undoubtedly there’s a bunch of other quotes from various wise civilisations that say pretty much the same thing. The bottom line is that you can do everything in your power to create a certain outcome, but it turns out that “everything in your power” is pretty much the square root of fuck all.

If you’re wondering why I’m rambling on, it’s because I don’t really know how to tell this bit of the story (does it show?) So, after the donor that wasn’t debacle, we went on holiday. We left the country (and disappointment about egg donors) for three whole weeks — a week of working remotely, and then two glorious weeks of doing nothing. I mean, I say nothing, but we packed it with quite a lot, in the nicest possible way.

I fell deeply, passionately in love with summer in a place that I thought I only loved because of what it was like it winter. I challenged my body to do things I secretly worried I wasn’t actually physically capable of, and watched it rise to the challenge. I spent time in nature, time with friends, time drinking wine and eating all the delicious things and just generally having a ball. Maybe it was the months of being cooped up that made everything so much sweeter, but those weeks really felt like life in technicolour in an utterly joyful way.

And then, about a week after we got home, I had The Most Excruciating Pain in one of my ovaries. It wasn’t continuous, but it was worryingly, abnormally painful. I lay in bed one night thinking about it. And — obviously — worrying what might cause that sort of pain. And at the same time I was thinking about cysts and tumours, it also occurred to me that I hadn’t really had a proper period that month. I’d had a bit of spotting, but it wasn’t a proper period. But then my period had been a bit weird for months — shorter cycles, longer cycles, spotting mid-way through a cycle, I’d just put it down the fact that I was probably perimenopausal. But that night, I came to what I considered was the only obvious explanation: I was finally pregnant, but it was an ectopic pregnancy. How could it be anything else? This would be just my luck, to actually get pregnant but for the embryo to implant in the wrong place.

The following morning I dug out an old (slightly out of date) pregnancy test.

Now I have spent YEARS wanting to see two lines on a pregnancy test. YEARS. It’s never happened. Ever. And then it did. And the first thing I thought was “FUUUUUUUUUCK”. Because it was ectopic, I just knew it. Things like that didn’t happen to me. My story couldn’t possibly be the straightforward story of the girl who spent seven years and fuck knows how many thousands of pounds on fertility treatments and then whoops accidentally got pregnant while waiting for an egg donor and while doing shitloads of high intensity exercise, drinking all the wine and having sex with no awareness of where in her cycle she was. Could it?

Well maybe it could. Because after I did another (not out of date) pregnancy test, and it was positive, and after I spoke to my GP who told me it was HIGHLY unlikely to be ectopic at this early stage (and that as I didn’t have any other symptoms that it was an ectopic pregnancy it was probably just ligament pain that happens in early pregnancy), I started to believe that I might actually be pregnant.