IVF Cycle 1: Waiting

I'm sitting here at 9:26am waiting for 10:30am so that we can call and find out if our eggs fertilised.

I'm very sore from the egg pickup operation, so I'm basically loafing around on the sofa. I'm reading, I'm staring into space, I'm watching TV, I probably look fairly relaxed, like I am having a nice lie-in. But I'm not relaxed at all. I'm waiting to find out if the process I've been thinking about and working towards for the last year is getting anywhere at all.

With all the information about the procedures they give you, nobody ever mentions the waiting.

You wait for the appointment with the specialist, which is booked weeks and months in advance. Then you wait to hear if you can go ahead. Then you wait for your cycle to start. Then you take the first lot of drugs and wait to find out if anything is happening. Then you take the second lot of drugs and wait to hear if your follicles are developing. If they are, you wait until they mature. Then you wait to have your trigger injection. Then you wait for the egg pickup operation. Then you wait to hear whether the eggs have fertilised. Then you wait another day or two for the transfer. Then you wait around for two weeks to find out if you are pregnant. Really, the whole thing is about 90% waiting and only about 10% treatment.

All this time, I am doing things. Working and looking after the Little Dude and the Big Dude and doing housework and volunteering for an emergency service. It looks like I am quite busy. But what I am actually doing in my head is waiting. My whole life feels like it is in a kind of suspended animation with bits of treatment only occasionally interrupting things. Sometimes the waiting kind of weighs in on me and my nerve starts to crack.

My Big Dude says that's what the war was like. Hours of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.

But at least I am waiting to hear if we are creating life and not death.