I write every appointment, injection, test, and procedure on my calendar, without a second thought. Today, after over a month of knowing the date of our embryo transfer, I still can’t seem to write the words down. Instead, the date swirls in my thoughts, almost like a far off finale. Something in the near future. Something at a safe distance.
Life before the transfer, and life after the transfer, is how life is broken down.
This one transfer. This one embryo. It feels needlessly dramatic and scary in an already overwhelming situation. Meanwhile, I’m worn out. The hot flashes, the sadness, the fluctuating hormone levels, the uncertainty, it all gets to me. Honestly, I think we believed early on that we had some sort of control over our fertility and family planning. We learned quickly that we did not.
Yet, being in limbo these days feels familiar and is better than a concrete yes or no pregnancy test result. At least in uncertainty, we can have hope. And we do, we have hope. There is comfort that our embryo is chilling out at the clinic, waiting to be transferred, but there is also reality, science, and statistics. All of which I try to avoid, most of the time with success.
We decided early on that we would only do one cycle of IVF. Financially, we couldn’t afford multiple cycles, but mix in my “advanced maternal age,” and jazzy sounding things like uterine fibroids, and the decision was made for us. Our hope was that we would have more than one embryo to transfer, but that was a choice also made for us. After retrieving eight eggs, only one was normal and made it to the necessary stage of development. We are placing a lot of hope in that one embryo.
Fear keeps me quiet. Fear that I will be seen as ungrateful for our one embryo or that I am somehow ruining our chances for the transfer to work by being realistic. What I mean to say is, this whole situation revolves around stress, worry, and fear. Feelings that no doubt impact my body and outlook. Stress and fear can negatively impact the body and its ability to heal, and that itself feels like a mean joke. Infertility causes stress, stress can cause health problems, infertility is affected by those problems…you see what I mean.
I don’t know, clearly, what this entry is about or what I am looking to gain from it. Part of me believes that getting the date out there, without expectation of writing it in my calendar, will give me the strength to actually do it. But, I’m not sure it works that way.
What I do know is that the transfer is six weeks away, January 19, 2022.
Stefanie Wielkopolan 