I ran away…

I ran away in January. To a place that I didn’t associate with trying and not succeeding. Somewhere I drank wine and stopped worrying about whether I was eating enough vegetables. (I wasn’t.) Somewhere I stopped caring if food was packaged in plastic (it was), or whether the tomatoes were organic (they weren’t). Somewhere my life wasn’t measured out in blood tests and supplements and scans and injections. Where I rudely

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And… pause…

So I started my second cycle, a medicated cycle — oestrogen three times daily from day two to suppress ovulation and build my womb lining, then at a certain point progesterone to mimic the effects of ovulation.

The idea is that you have a scan somewhere between day 10 and day 12 and the endometrium looks thick and then you start on the progesterone, and then five days later they do the transfer (assuming all the eggs/sperm defrost OK and you Continue reading

The result…

So I got the results of the ERA test… and they were normal. Basically my endometrium was receptive on the standard day. I’m not one of the 25 per cent of women who should have their embryo transferred before or after the standard day. And I don’t need to pay £1200 to have another test to narrow down the window of receptivity. Which should make me feel delighted. But weirdly left me feeling rather flat.

I guess I was hoping that this was going to give me The Answer. This was going to tell me Continue reading

So it turns out I was right…

… in that I’m not pregnant.

It shouldn’t really be that much of a surprise – who gets pregnant on their first round of IVF with one embryo? Well obviously some people do but not me. And while the logical part of my brain had committed to at least three, maybe more, cycles, there was a sliver of me thinking, “It could be me, I could be one of the lucky ones…”

And now, I’m going to sound like a complete dick, but I’m going to say it anyway. I don’t really know how to fail at stuff. I’ve passed every exam Continue reading