IVF Journey: 20w4d 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.

This is my first bump shot, mainly because even though I’m nearly 21 weeks in I’ve not had much of a bump to show.

I’m now at that inbetweeny stage where some might just wonder if I’m a bit fat. The husband says you can tell because it is all in the one place, but I don’t think I’d be confident to ask me about it yet! I think maybe my natural posture and the reasonable size of my boobs masks it a bit too.

But I’d say the last week I’ve sorta ‘come out’ as pregnant, as in I’m wearing it proudly for people to notice if they want to.

Even so, today I was in a work meeting with some midwives and they didn’t know I was pregnant until I told them.

I wanted to mention baby movements as I haven’t before. They say with a first pregnancy a woman might notice a fluttering of baby movements around week 18-22, but that if pregnant for a subsequent time the feelings might be recognised from week 14 or so.

I’ve felt a movement from week 14 that I thought was the baby. I’ve not mentioned it here as I suppose I was monitoring it to see if it really was anything.

It feels like a muscle tic, and I’ve felt it in the general uterus area periodically since then. Not regularly, or every day, but the same feeling every so often.

They say the size of the woman can make a difference to whether you can feel the baby or not. I’ve not been especially thin in years, but neither am I fat. And maybe my stomach muscles are quite tight because (when not stricken with pregnancy nausea) I swim a lot. Maybe this means I can feel things happening inside that area quite well.

More so, though, I’m familiar with my natural feelings that come from within. This muscle tic feeling, I’d not had that before and it kept repeating. That is unusual, hence I thought it might be the baby.

Well I think it probably was, but either way it has turned into something similar but more distinct in the last week. Now I get feelings that are a bit like the tic but bigger – like a bubble bursting. It is pleasant, and doesn’t feel like there is a separate thing inside me. It doesn’t feel painful or surprising. I feels part of me, and yet… not. It is nice, I like it. These feelings come quite often, I notice them more than once an hour if I’m lounging about in the evening. I’m pretty sure it’s him in there moving about.

Sometimes I’ve let the husband have a feel, but on these occasions the baby has chosen not to do much and so the husband has not felt anything yet.