I should have written this sooner, I have kept thinking about it but in-between pregnancy anxiety, fate tempting, sleepless nights and getting over a c-section it’s just not happened, but now, on Sylvie’s half birthday it feels like the right time.
I can’t believe it’s taken me 6 months – and that’s just the time she’s been out in the world not the time since we finally got that BFP (Big Fat Positive for all you lucky non IVFers around here 😉). During the pregnancy, there was a constant underlying niggle of ‘what if’ so I felt a little uncomfortable writing about things at length…just incase.
But now little Sylvie Noelle is here and has been for a whole 6 months. A period that feels both nothing and everything at the same time.
On our fifth round, and one round away from a donor route this little girl decided to stick with us. I got the giggles as they put her 5 day blasto self back in, suddenly seeing the pathetic hilarity of the fact that I was back here again, legs akimbo, my husband witnessing the incredibly un-sexy act in a blue shower cap as our Dr burrowed around between my legs and a nurse stood watching. The complete comicality of it all dawned on me and I got a fit of the giggles the likes of which I have not had since school. The kind that the more you try to stifle it, the worse it gets and the Dr gave me quite a stern telling off because it was making his job all the harder. So not only did Sylvie make her womb debut to giggles she also went in on April Fools day. I don’t know what that tells us about what her future holds…
We didn’t do anything different this time, we went for lunch after and then went home and got on with life. I allowed myself to get a tiny bit hopeful when I had ‘the lightening’ as some people call it, sitting on the sofa a few days in. It’s like a short sharp intense pain where a period pain would usually be, they say it’s the embryo implanting but how you have any nerve endings in your womb lining I don’t know. I had it once before but to no avail so remained cautiously optimistic.
I had decided not to wait 10 days again for blood tests and after reading that a test can pick up a yey or a nay after just 5 days it seemed to make sense to just get peeing. This to me felt obvious, why would I want to keep myself in idle hope for an extra 5 days when I could find out earlier? And so I did a test as early as I could, and low and behold a very faint second line appeared, so faint I did another test the next day, and the day after that. And it got darker, and the next day darker still and I kept it up pretty much each day not allowing myself to get too excited until the blood test confirmed it, we were having a baby.
I continued to do tests every few days until the scan, scared of a false positive or that this little embryo was going to give up the ghost. But it didn’t, and by the time our first scan came around I was feeling more positive, if still a little tentative. It took pretty much the whole pregnancy, which was a comparatively easy one, for me to feel secure in the knowledge that I would actually be having a baby at some point.
We had all the health checks at the earliest stage possible as I’m not on the young side and didn’t want to get too attached if there was something wrong. At the same time, we got the sex at the earliest opportunity. Somehow, she was a she – which is unheard of in my husbands family. I was so certain we were going to have a boy that I kept asking midwives at each scan what they could see. Looking back now I can’t even remember the phone call/or letter that told us she was a girl, we’ve both been racking our brains to try to remember the moment – it’s crazy how quickly things pale in your memory once you get to the other side. I wish I’d kept a diary.
She came two weeks early, but that whole debacle is a story for another day. Suffice to say, just like that, two years of blood tests, tears, hospital gowns, hearts at rock bottom, injections, doctors and BFNs faded away to nothing and we had a little girl.
