Haisla's Adventures in Endoland

I kind of knew this already on Sunday, as I peed on a stick to give us a bit of a heads up & time to process before the actual OTD on Tuesday, and it came back stark white. Not even a squinter was to be seen.

It turns out that at this stage in the game a BFN is far less devastating news than waking up to a failing pregnancy. Not being pregnant is the norm for us, so nothing's really changed. And after two weeks of being on hyper-alert about any potential symptoms (also known as the dreaded TWW) returning back to normal is actually quite a relief.

I think for some reason M. felt this failure far more acutely than I did. I guess I had the benefit of living in my body for the TWW and realising that I didn't really 'feel' pregnant. Not like I did last time. I mean I had symptoms and all, but none of them were really wholly convincing. Sure I felt nauseous, tired, etc, but I would like to have it here on record that they were just symptoms of the progesterone, should I ever come to wonder.

Anyway, I'm now waiting for a call-back from the clinic for our WTF appointment. This is the end of free treatments, so we need to talk game-plan. The guidelines recommend a two month wait between cycles, but unless there are very good medical grounds for that recommendation, I would like to (and M. agrees with me) to proceed with another FET as soon as possible (i.e. in December). Because it turns out that FET cycles are actually quite long. If I wait for one cycle (to help my body reset or whatever) and start a new FET cycle in December, the earliest we would transfer an embryo is mid-Jan. Waiting for two months would push things to Feb and we just haven't got that kind of time, thanks very much.

There's a list of questions I have for the Doc when we next see him/her (we don't have a regular RE at our clinic, but see a different doctor every time), one of them being about transferring two. Now that we've proven that perhaps the quality of our embryos is not quite as high as the doctors originally assumed, perhaps it'll be less risky to transfer two. Because again, I'm not sure we've got time to do 6 FETs in a row, in case it turns out that all of our embryos are bad. That would mean that by the time we get to do another fresh IVF cycle I'll be pushing 37 and M. his mid-40s. And as we all know what time does to egg quality, it's one of those things I'm not keen to take a gamble on.

So that's the plan, and just having a plan makes me feel so much better. I can wait one month to let my system recalibrate - I mean, after all,  I've become a bit of an expert on waiting. In December this year, I will have waited for 48 months in all. If anyone would have told me that in early 2012 I would have had a heart attack, and probably never had had the nerve to even start on this journey. Sometimes it's best not knowing what the future holds, eh.

Upwards and onwards, then. I'm dusting myself off and moving on.