Almost that time!

Sorry I've been a bad blogger and have been away for a few days. I'm finding it very hard to post on the weekends when I'm working. I'd like to say I'll get better at it, but that's probably not true. So, I'll be gone a few days a week, usually on the weekends when other people have more time to post. You get to catch up with other blogs on the weekends, and save your valuable mid-week time for me--how considerate of me, huh?

Here's the important part: As of Sunday morning, all 8 embryos were still growing well. In fact, the embryologist was grading all of them as "A" that morning. Since we have created such splendid embies, we are doing a 5-day transfer tomorrow morning at 11. It's going to be a very long day, with most of it spent in the car. See, they recommend acupuncture both before and after transfer. So I will be driving 20 miles north to acupuncture before 8am (love my acupuncturist--she's coming in early to see me), then about 100 miles south of there to the main RE office for transfer, then back north to acupuncture before finally heading home for bedrest. I guess it's good that I will be out getting some sunshine and fresh air since I will have a few long days inside ahead of me after that. The office suggests 3-5 days of modified bedrest so I'm trying to get everything done today to get ready for it.

I'm finding that my old frenemy Hope is creeping her way back in. I'm starting to let myself believe that this might actually be successful. I mean, we have to have some hope--why bother going forward if we don't have any hope of it working?



We hope that this struggle doesn't put so much strain on our relationship and emotions that we end up irrevocably broken. We hope to someday move past the bitterness and jealousy at every friend's pregnancy announcement. We hope to not always stare at young families and wish for what could have been, what should have been ours. We hope with all of our might to become parents at some point at the end of this. We hope we will finally see two lines, hear a heartbeat, feel movement, hold a precious healthy baby. We hope to raise our children in a home full of love and appreciation for all we had to endure to get to that point.

Hope can be such a double-edged sword in the midst of this IF struggle though. Hope allows us to keep going, but it also brings us to such depths of despair when the next cycle or treatment doesn't work. Hope tricks our minds into thinking "when" instead of "if". Hope breaks our hearts and spirits when we come crashing back to the reality of this very long journey each month.

Like I said, though, I've started to find myself believing that this might actually happen--that I might be one of the lucky ones who get pregnant on their first IVF cycle. I was sitting in the waiting room before my acupuncture appointment yesterday and there was a "Fit Pregnancy" magazine on the top of the pile on the table. In the past, I've been known to cover it up with something else to avoid having to stare at the beaming preggo on the cover. But this time, I left it alone. I actually found myself scanning the titles on the cover. I didn't dare pick it up for fear of an alarm going off somewhere--"IFer reading pregnancy magazine, alert the universe to crap all over her for being so bold." But I admit I did look at it and thought "just maybe"--hope that wasn't enough to jinx me!