IVF Journey: Embryo transfer plus 8

This is my IVF diary. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for three and a half years now, and have a diagnosis of 'unexplained infertility'. We have finally reached the top of the waiting list for IVF - a form of assisted conception. I'm blogging about what happens as it happens, as a kind of therapy for me and as an awareness raising exercise of what IVF is all about.

Tomorrow is the big day. Sort of. Well the husband and I can't decide how big the day is.

Tomorrow I go in to the clinic for a blood test (as I have done a squillion times before) and phone in later for the results (as I have done a squillion times before). The difference is that tomorrow they will confirm whether I am pregnant or not. It might be a no. Or it might be a yes.

If it a no tomorrow we decided yesterday that we are going to have another go. This is a decision that we wanted to leave until we saw how awful the IVF process was and if we could face it again. Best to decide now, when the first go is nearly done but we're not all emotional having received a no. A day or so before the result we decided that the process was... tolerable. So Plan B is that we'll be seeing how quickly we can get back on the horse. We have however decided to put some boundaries around this. We will not go on with it forever. We will re-evaluate again either if we have had three unsuccessful embryo transfers, or if we have had two unsuccessful cycles (i.e. egg collections). If it gets round to October and we have not been successful we will take a break - book a diving holiday and get pissed over the festive season.

If it is a yes tomorrow then it is just the start. True, it will be amazing news, and true we will be in uncharted territory never having had a positive pregnancy test before. But we still have to keep worrying for a bit! Technically the blood test tomorrow is kind equivalent to a woman finding out she has conceived naturally the day she misses her period and anyone would be excited that day. But as I have said before, things can go wrong. If we get a yes tomorrow we will have a scan a week or so after, and they keep us on the books during the first trimester before releasing us to a midwife if all is well at that point. I imagine they do more tests and stuff, but they have not really mentioned that yet. So a yes tomorrow is not the end of the process or the end of the nervousness. Maybe the scan next week is the important one? And we know we may still need to revert to Plan B at some point.

This is all a big deal, clearly, but every point along the way took a similar course and at every point we could have received bad news. This isn't different. In order to keep cool we need to understand that it could go either way, not make too big a deal out of it, and see this as a mid point of the process whatever the outcome.

They say the two week wait is the hardest bit of IVF, but I disagree. The hardest of hard bits was never-ending infertility. Round one has been nothing compared to how low I felt before we started. But IVF-wise, for me the hardest bit was the five days between egg collection and embryo transfer during which time I actively worried that my eggs were all dead. During the two week wait the chosen one has been front of mind for me often, but I have not been actively worrying about the next step for much of the time. I reckon there is some sort of equation there which considers the risk involved, and how this weighs up against the hope that you have. When I could not conceive naturally and had no IVF in sight I had no hope. If the IVF process resulted in no embryos, we would have had little hope. But so far during the two week wait I have had no reason to lose hope, and the thing feels less terminal because we have seven eggs on ice so this won't be the end of the road if it is a no.

Today I am cautiously hopeful.

And I fully expect to freak out a bit tomorrow morning!