Expectations

So I had my embryo transfer yesterday. There's good news and bad. Not all of the seven embryos made it to day five. That's the bad news. The good news is two of them did. I had both transferred. They were at early blastocyst stage and weren't brilliant, but good quality. I spent all day (well almost all day) yesterday and today lying on the couch hoping those two embryos were getting comfortable and implanting themselves in my lining. I’ve also had two acupuncture sessions to help to guide them along. Now all I can do is wait.


I’m currently having pregnyl injections for luteal phase support. This is the only difference between the drugs I’ve had in previous cycles and this one. Normally I’ve used a progesterone gel which is applied directly into the cervix and has awful side effects. I asked my doctor to prescribe something else this time and I’ve ended up with the pregnyl. The problem with pregnyl is that it makes your body feel like its pregnant so you experience pregnancy symptoms even on the day of transfer. Luckily I’m well aware of this so I’m not going to allow myself to get too excited by things like sore breasts and nausea (why would any sane person get excited by those things?!). I’m not sure if it’s related to the pregnyl but I’ve also had severe pain in my lower abdomen on my right side. This can be normal because the pregnyl makes the ovaries work to produce progesterone as opposed to administering the progesterone gel. But I don’t have an ovary on my right side. I rang my clinic and they couldn’t explain it but said to come in if it gets unbearable. It’s subsided now so I’m not too worried but it kept me up for most of the night.


I guess there’s not much else to report. I now have to endure the next 12 days waiting to have the blood test. The worst part of this wait is that I normally analyse every little thing that my body is doing and then consult Dr Google to see if it’s related to pregnancy. This time I’m going to avoid that and blame every little twinge and symptom on the pregnyl. Although it’s very possible that this could be the cycle that works, I don’t want to allow myself to be excited. Quite the opposite. I’m trying to convince myself to expect the worst. This is my third embryo transfer; two of my cycles yielded no eggs and in the two other cycles that I made it to transfer, my period arrived before my test day. No test required. The pain was devastating. I had expectations then. I like to think that this time I don’t have any expectations so the pain of failure won’t be so bad. I suspect I’m kidding myself.