IVF UPDATE: THE RESULTS ARE IN

Well, it’s the day of reckoning and we’ve had our pregnancy blood test.  The results came through at 2pm today.  We’re not pregnant.

It’s disappointing, but we had an inclining earlier in the week as I had the first blood test to check for the pregnancy hormone on Monday and it came back negative as well.  I’ve had a few days to process the news so I’m not as shell shocked as I was on Monday night.

The only thing I can think of to describe it at the moment is disappointing.  We’d gone into this cycle thinking that it wouldn’t work because it was the first cycle and there would be things that needed to be done to see how I would react.  (Like the medication and the fertilization.)  But when the fertilization went so well I think we got a little carried away with the possibilities.

In some ways I’ve felt guilty because on one hand I’m kind of relieved that it didn’t work.  I know that’s just fear of the unknown and the “what if I’m a bad parent” thoughts playing out.  But I can’t help but think about relishing our together time a little more now that it hasn’t worked.

We talked together at length on Monday night about what we’re going to do now that it hasn’t worked.  At heart I’m a quitter.  The minute anything looks hard I’m out of there.   I only ever stick with things that are easy for me to do well at.  It’s a horrible trait, but I acknowledge it’s existence.  So it’s really pushing all of my buttons that I can’t quit at this.

Actually, I probably would have quit by now if it wasn’t for HUBBY.   With the cyst, the D&C and the gastric sleeve all happening last year I would have quit a long time ago.  In fact after our first assisted cycle I did quit… for about a year.  I cried “too hard” and so we stopped.  But not this time.   This time I’m going to suck it up and push through until we get our result or we use up all of our embryos trying.  Once that happens we’ll re-evaluate where we’re at.

I’m concerned that if we do stop between cycles I’ll delay us going back again.  I’m a procrastinator when it’s not something I want to do and HUBBY (bless him) allows me to do procrastinate when he doesn’t want to argue.  So really, I need to push through this.

There’s two things I won’t be doing on the next cycles.  The first is acupuncture.  It’s a waste of time and money for me.  I know that other people swear by it, but for me it did nothing.  I never left there feeling relaxed, in fact often I left there feeling like I’d wasted an hour of my time and $85 of our hard earned money.  The acupuncturists I saw were brilliant though, and for their bedside manner I would highly recommend them.  But for me, I’d rather blow the time and money on a relaxation massage.

The other thing I won’t be doing is buying any home pregnancy tests.  I started taking them on Saturday night and it did nothing to help my mood.  I rationalized it by saying that seeing the negative on the test would help me adjust to hearing the news, but all it really did was steal some of the time I could have spent enjoying the possibility.  Although, on some level I think it did help me prepare for the negative I also think it was like peeking at your Christmas presents early.  The next cycle I’m going to wait and have the nurses break it to me.

At times during this process I’ve questioned the wisdom of sharing with people at work, friends and the internet about our journey, but I think (on the whole) it’s been really helpful.  I felt for people that we knew through the internet on Monday and today because it’s so hard to know what to say to someone.  But, that aside, it’s been good to have a community of sorts around us.  We don’t have anyone in our immediate circle that’s been through this so it’s great to be able to tap into the support and wisdom that’s out there in the big wired world.

Right now I’m waiting on hearing back from my Fertility Specialist about how soon we can start our next cycle.  I’m hoping that he’s not the kind of doctor that recommends a break in between cycles, and if he is I’m going to argue that we don’t need a break.  Either way we’ll know in the next couple of days what’s going to happen.  I’m really excited about it and feel like I’m in a good frame of mind for it.  I know that it will happen for us, that we will get a family of our own, this is just the journey we need to go on to get it.