We decided to hit and hope and go ahead with the cycle, albeit in a slightly different way.

B and I had discussed whether we would transfer one or two embryos. We’d looked into the risks for the babies and the mother of a twin pregnancy. We’d looked at the statistical likelihood of a singleton or twins from two transferred embryos. We’d talked about the fact that if we were lucky enough to have one child and had embryos left, I was probably too old to try for a sibling in a few years. We’d talked about the pros and cons of only children and siblings. And we’d talked about the fact that we had ten quality embryos. Ten embryos is a total gift. But, as I explained to my consultant when we’d initially discussed this, me trying not to cry at the thought of how many negative pregnancy tests I had the emotional capacity to deal with. (I know, I know, I’ll talk more in another post about the impossibility of thinking positive when you’ve been through what I’ve been through.) “I know me, I know what I’m like, if we have ten embryos, I will try until we have nothing left to try with. And I can’t do ten embryos transfers. Five, yes, ten, no.” And so we’d decided — rather against her advice — we would transfer two.

Until the point where what we thought was a carefully calculated cycle with all the variables managed and optimised for success became this scrambled shitshow that might or might not work and if it wasn’t going to work did we really want to squander one fifth of our embryos on the hit and hope? The Hail Mary pass? The – I dunno, I’m sure there’s another weird sporting metaphor…?

Because the fact that I’d ovulated meant that if we went for it, we went for it knowing that the thickness of my womb lining wasn’t ideal. We went for it with me having very little faith in the clinic’s ability to calculate the date of transfer correctly (remember that ERA test I did aeons ago that flagged the crucial importance of transferring in the perfect window?) But if there was a fleeting chance it might work, we wanted to try. After all, as B put it “if we don’t do a transfer it definitely won’t work, and if we do, and only transfer one, we’ve not wasted this cycle and if it doesn’t work, we’ve only used one of our ten embryos.”

So we decided to transfer one. And I was sure it wasn’t going to work. So sure that, less than five hours after the transfer, I was cheering England to victory against Denmark at Wembley — I’d been offered a ticket to see England in a semi-final, I wasn’t going to turn it down. So sure that we were away for the weekend which should have been the day of the blood test where I found out whether I was pregnant or not, and I didn’t care. So sure, that we booked a holiday leaving four days after the end of the two-week wait.