Drumroll please...
After three grueling months of holding in the news, I am very pleased to say we ARE preggers with one little baby!
Wait, did I say three months? Yep. I delayed posting my dealings in IVF until the end of the cycle, because I knew if the doctor called with the good news we would wait a couple months before announcing. After everything we went through we were not gonna jinx it!
These three months have been a stressful, joyful, and whimsical time. For starters, when the doctor called to tell me I was pregnant, it wasn't all unicorns and rainbows. In one breath, she told me I was pregnant and then came the nasty three letter word,
but...
Hearing that horrible little word, Inner B started screaming,
BUT?? What is this but
. Did she just say BUT?? And the doctor continued, "...you're hCG levels are low, so you need to come back in a few days to do another test." And then we scheduled the appointment and that was it. That was how I got my news. I got to revel in it for five seconds before the worrying began (my doctor knowingly told me that the worrying never stops. Not when I hit three months, not when I have the baby, never. It is a mother's perogative to worry about her child. True dat.).
Okay, so now what? I got this amazing news but my stomach's on the ground, freaking out (and I better pick it back up b/c there's a baby in there!). I'm a little bit pregnant? wtf? I wasn't told about this part. I thought it was,
you're pregnant!- And that was it. Then I'd wait the obligatory three months and then announce it and everyone hugs me and my belly becomes the most fascinating part of me for the next six months.
But that is not how it goes for IVF patients. I was in and out of the fertility clinic about twice a week for the first two months, making sure I was "still pregnant". I did every meditation, ate every health food, did everything Dr. Oz told me to do. I was not gonna let this kid go!
Luckily, for the next two weeks, the hCG blood tests were very good, until... we got to four and a half weeks. At five weeks you can see the heartbeat, and once the heart starts beating your chances of miscarriage goes way down. But the week before we went in to see the heartbeat, we got the news that my hCG levels were not increasing at the same speed as before and we'd have to come in after the weekend to see if there was a heartbeat. But the problem was, it was Memorial Day weekend! So we had to wait a whole extra, grueling day to find out what the hell was going on. It was not happiness in the household that weekend.
I did a lot of meditating, relaxation excercises, and nude moon dancing on the beach, praying that the little embryo would stay in the warm home it was making inside me. And when I finally slid into those stir-ups and the doctor put that ultrasound inside me, I was on the verge of a breakdown but as soon as we saw the heartbeat, all fear went away and we were just in awe of the fact that there was really something growing inside me and it wasn't an alien, it was a baby.
And it still IS a baby. A healthy, 12 week old fetus.
But the story doesn't end there...
