IVF Journey: 19w5d pregnant

This is my IVF diary. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for four 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.

It’s a boy!

Today was our foetal anomaly (20 week) scan where we had an ultrasound to check that Kipling was all in one piece. He was.

I wasn’t so nervous about this scan as I had been about the first one, as we’ve heard his heartbeat quite often, I do seem to be getting bigger, and he was vaguely baby-shaped last time they scanned him.

We got to the hospital and had trouble finding a parking space, but arrived on time and only had to wait a minute before we went in.

You’re supposed to have a fairly full bladder for the scan, but I learned from last time and this time I didn’t drink anything extra than what I would normally. This seemed to be fine.

The scanning lady exposed my midriff and jellied it up a bit, then off we went.

Immediately we could see quite a big looking baby on the screen, with a beating heart. All good signs to the layman!

The scanning lady then went through all of the different bits of the baby to look for anomalies. She measured the head, brain and legs and she looked for evidence of heart and kidney function. We saw the spine and ribs and hands and feet. She checked for eyes and mouth. Everything was pronounced normal.

The ribs and feet (pictured) were particularly awesome to see, so little but so clear.

It is bonkers to think that all that is inside me.

And that he is wriggling about and moving his arms, and I can’t feel it.

She then asked if we’d like to find out if it was a boy or a girl, and we said we did.

She showed us the evidence that it was a boy. To be honest I couldn’t have known from looking but she seemed to be sure there was boy parts there.

It brought a tear to my eye to know he is a boy. Suddenly the future opened up and I could imagine him better as a future boy baby. A real separate living thing, not just a foetus.

My first thoughts were ‘I’m glad he’s a boy so he won’t have to have pregnancy sickness’ and ‘ooh we can get him a little kilt’.