Tag Archives: nothing means anything

Tempting fate…

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You know I’m not superstitious. But perhaps inevitably I can’t help being with this. Given everything that’s gone before, I don’t know how I couldn’t be. How I could ever be someone who would assume it would all be fine. Despite all the scans that told me otherwise.

Because we’d had that six week scan, and then our clinic offered us an early scan at eight weeks, and then because we wanted to do the Harmony test (a blood test that looks for three different chromosomal abnormalities and can be done from ten weeks onwards. It’s sometimes offered on the NHS but if it is, it’s usually at a later stage) we booked a private package that combined a 10-week scan, the Harmony test and a 12-week scan. And all of them were fine. In all of them, the measurements were what they should be. The things they were meant to be able to see, they could see. Everything looked normal.

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A thing but not a thing

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And so, as you might reasonably have expected, and as I might have slightly given away in my last post, given how contrarily these things go, the fact that I was so convinced it wasn’t going to work meant that when, on the morning we were going away for the weekend, and I did a precautionary First Response test, it showed the faintest of faint – but still very definitely there – lines.

Or, as I put it to B when I walked back into the bedroom “Well I’m not ‘Not Pregnant’.” But I wasn’t going to get too excited. It was early. It could be a chemical pregnancy. It wasn’t a thing until it was a thing.

But then, when I did another test 48 hours later, that line was definitely darker. And 48 hours after that, the blood test confirmed that, that day at least, I was pregnant. Because that was how I thought of it. That’s how I’ve continued to think about it. On those fertility forums I despise, I’ve seen women talk about being “PUPO” – Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise, but after the miscarriage, after everything we’ve been through, I feel quite the opposite. I feel like “that day I know I was definitely pregnant but until the next blood test / scan, I can’t assume I still am.”

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The worst clubs in the world…

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You know that plan to wait until 10 weeks for a scan? Yeah well on the day I woke up and my boobs didn’t hurt like they did before, I caved. Despite finding forums full of women saying the exact same thing had happened to them and they’d had healthy babies, I became utterly convinced that I had had a silent, or missed, miscarriage, where the foetus stops growing but you don’t bleed. I spent the morning in tears, suddenly realising quite how much I wanted everything to be ok. Knowing B was right when he told me that getting upset when we didn’t know if there was anything to get upset about was counterproductive. Knowing he was also right when he said that if this doesn’t work out we’re not in any different place than we were in before, and yet still knowing that for all our backup plans, this was the plan I wanted to work.

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Secrets and lies…

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I once wrote during my first ever two week wait that “nothing means anything” – it was basically about the idea that you couldn’t deduce anything from a single symptom, that a headache, no headache, bleeding, absence of bleeding, cramps, absence of cramps — all of it seemed as likely to be an indicator that you were pregnant as you weren’t. Never had that felt more true.

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So this is Christmas…

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…And I thought I’d give you an update. Quite a long one. It’s not very Christmassy, sorry. There are no babies in mangers. Quite the opposite, in fact. But something happened yesterday that made me want to write again, so here I am.

First the good news. We’re still together. Nearly two years after we first met, we’re still together — living together, buying property together, trying to have a child together.

I’m not going to pretend it’s all hearts and flowers. Enmeshing two lives is never straightforward. Especially when you’re not 25 any more. And to be fair, it’s not me that has taken the brunt of the upheaval. I’m still living in the same house that I’ve been living in for nearly 15 years, surrounded by my friends.

He’s the one who turned his life upside down. Continue reading →

Today was a bad day…

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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.” Continue reading →

The result….

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I know we all try to manage our own expectations but I think it was the point when I was writing about embryo grading that I convinced myself that I wasn’t pregnant. It just seemed so hugely, utterly improbable when I was writing it down in black and white. And I know the odds mean nothing if you’re the one it happens to but still…

I’d already decided that I was going to do a home pregnancy test before the blood test. Continue reading →

I was not expecting that…

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So as I mentioned in my last post, my latest cycle was a completely natural cycle. The aim was to get one egg (although there was another follicle that looked almost big enough so I was hoping we might get two but the consultant told me it was just too small) — so one egg from no drugs when I got two eggs from loads of drugs, didn’t seem too bad. But then that’s a lot of pressure on that one egg…

And because I haven’t written this in real time, Continue reading →

A catch up…

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For various reasons I’ve not seen my pet consultant in a while — she’s been on holiday, she’s been in theatre, she’s been ill — and so the cycle that was cancelled I didn’t see her at all, and so far this cycle I haven’t seen her either. The clinic doesn’t make any guarantees about this, after all it’s a 7-day-a-week operation, you can’t ever guarantee to see the same person each time. But because I have up until now, it’s been a bit weird for me.

I sort of feel dumped and cut adrift even though I know Continue reading →

Conflicting thoughts…

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I constantly have two conflicting series of thoughts in my head:

– why should it work first time around?

– well sometimes it does, doesn’t it?

– but you know you were thinking you’d do at least three rounds?

– well yes, but what if you can’t even get three embryos from your eggs?

– you need to stop thinking negatively, one day at a time, remember?

– I know but I need to prepare myself to not fall apart if I’m not pregnant

– ONE. DAY. AT. A. TIME

That cognitive dissonance my friend was talking about. It could drive a person mad. And it Continue reading →