Sep
03

6dp3dt.

Saturday morning, as we were rushing around getting ready for my in-laws to arrive, I had a bit of a pant crisis. Namely, I didn’t fit into any. Though I have gained less than five pounds during this IVF cycle, they seem to congregate around my midsection in an alarmingly protuberant fashion. I have been wearing forgiving dresses for the past week or so, but alas, in our zeal to clear our bedroom floor before the guests descended all of my dresses and skirts were gathered up and pitched into the washing machine.

I give you this expository information in an attempt, though probably insufficient, to explain this:
IVF: 1, Dignity: 0

Yes, that is duct tape.
When it became clear that no amount of huffing and puffing and kneading of flesh was going to induce my jeans to button, I remembered The Rubber Band Trick. This is one of those small pieces of pregnancy lore you hear and store away for when you, yourself are with child—I had been storing that tidbit for almost three years, and I was damn well going to get some use out of it, barren or not. For those of you who don’t know, The Rubber Band Trick is to extend the life of your non-maternity pants by looping a rubber band through the button hole and around the button. Hooray! Problem solved!
Except we didn’t have any rubber bands.

At this point my voice began increasing in pitch until Scott grabbed a roll of duct tape. At first I thought he was going to use it to cover my mouth, and then I thought he was going to attempt to brutishly lash the pants to my body, but instead he devised the above clever little stratagem, and I greeted my in-laws with my pants held together by a rudimentary duct-tape belt. Thank heavens for tunic-length tops.

The rest of the weekend went much more smoothly, and having my in-laws around was actually a welcome distraction from what might or might not have been going on in my undercarriage.

To give you a little more information about the none-to-freeze situation, as it turns out “quite a few” (embryologist’s words—I was too disoriented to demand much detail) of our embryos made it to blast, but none were suitable for freezing, and so were discarded. One of them was very close, a 4BB I think, but the others were all lower quality, some missing one of the two cell sections entirely. I asked about the quality of our embryos on day three, to try to ascertain whether we had definitely transfered the ones most likely to implant, and was told that the two we transfered were our only grade 2s. We had no grade 1s (the highest grade at my clinic) and the other fifteen were grades 3 and 4, most of them only four or five cells. We had “a couple” eight-celled embryos on day three, but they were grade 3, so it does look like the seven- and nine-celled embryos were our best bet, and the embryologist assured me that the fact that they had an odd number of cells is not significant (no idea if this is true or if she was merely trying to stop my infernal sniffling).

Friday night was hard. Having nothing frozen for Plan B was a shock. Hearing that most of my embryos were such poor quality on day three was a shock. I don’t know if it was a protocol issue (too much LH) or whether my eggs are just prematurely rotten. I am petrified of what will happen if this doesn’t work. I wasn’t being dramatic when I said we can’t afford another fresh cycle—we really can’t. Scott keeps declaring that he will get three jobs and we will have the money saved within six months, but he is still in the middle of a brutal search to find a primary job that pays well enough for us to do more than barely scrape by, and now we have debt from this cycle as well. I don’t see how we could possibly raise the money in less than a year, assuming he finds a better job, um, tomorrow. And the thought of waiting to try again, after all of the waiting we have done, makes me physically sick to my stomach.

As of this morning, pregnancy tests are negative. I know it’s too early, but I also know that won’t stop me from dry heaving in terror if tomorrow’s test is negative as well.
This should be an interesting week.

By Alexa | Posted in Ceci N'est Pas Une Ecrivaine |