To Grow A Human

I have a confession to make. If you’ve seen earlier blog posts you’ll know that earlier this year I wrote a piece about IVF which basically ended up with me being on the radio chatting to Ray D’arcy about our experience with fertility treatment. Well, I must confess that at the time of that interview, I had already just done a transfer, and although I didn’t quite know it yet, I was already pregnant! Yes, I’m growing a human.

In late February I went back on the fertility medication to prepare for our third frozen embryo transfer, our second attempt at a brother or sister for Rian. This process isn’t as intrusive as the process for a full round of IVF – these embryos were frozen after that original round in 2013 when we were extremely lucky to be able to freeze 7 high quality embryos. Rian was the first transfer, we had one late last year which failed, so this was transfer number three.

With that in mind I’m very familiar with the process and know the routine. You take oestrogen tablets 3 times a day along with progesterone pills twice a day. Nice little cocktail of hormones going on there, plenty of fun for everyone. After about 2 weeks of that you go the clinic where they give you an ultrasound to check the lining of your womb – it needs to be thick in preparation for the replacement of the embryo. If it’s too thin, the embryo won’t be able to implant and start growing. Once everything is doing what it should, they give you a time for the transfer and in you go.

It’s a relatively quick process. They select what looks to be the strongest embryo and thaw it out, a couple of hours before it’s due to be transferred. You’re brought into the theatre room. They scan your wrist band and ask you to state your name and date of birth a few times while two other people call out ID codes and confirm ID codes again to make sure you’re getting your own embryo, cos that could be awkward. Then they show you little embryo on the screen, you give him a little wave and hope you’ll see him again in 9 months time.

The embryo is then placed in a tiny tube, sort of like the inside tube of a biro, except thinner. It’s about the size of a poppyseed. Using an ultrasound so the doctor can see where he/she is putting it, the tube is inserted and they release it close to the lining of your womb. It is within some sort of liquid so that when they release it they can see, otherwise it would be too small for the ultrasound to pick up.

And job done.

They give you a pregnancy test and a date for testing, and release you into the hell that is the two week waiting time before you can find out whether it has worked. You continue to take the hormone cocktails which greatly add to your emotions during the two weeks of waiting torture, and not in a good way.

Over the next two weeks you torture yourself with – Yay it has worked! / Christ it hasn’t worked. It’s mental torture. After a wait about as long as an Ice Age, test day finally arrives, and it’s quite hard to do the test due to the shaking of your hands from nerves and the knot of dread in your stomach. After a couple of minutes of extra intense torture….two pink lines appeared. Embryo was still in there. Baby number two is on its way!

We absolutely know and appreciate how lucky we are to be expecting our second baby especially when the odds of treatment aren’t as high as you would want them to be. But this doesn’t mean that it’s not still hard. I touched on this in older posts that I wrote while pregnant with Rian – how I thought that getting pregnant would be the hard bit, but actually for me, being pregnant is not much of a picnic. In fact even saying the word picnic makes me think of certain foods that makes me want to heave!

At first I feel that I’m not entitled to not enjoy it, that I should automatically love every second of it purely because of the route we have to take to even get pregnant. But I have to be honest – I don’t really enjoy the being pregnant bit, unfortunately I’m one of those women that has all the crappy stuff that goes with pregnancy. On Rian I was nauseous all day long at the start, but this time around, on a good day I might get sick once, on a bad day it was 3 or 4 times a day. Throughout this you still must function as normal – get on trains and public transport, do your day to day work, manage a toddler. It’s not easy! Yes I am grateful, so much so I can’t even put it into words, but that doesn’t make me automatically enjoy it.

I’m just at the 4 month mark now, and finally the sickness is starting to ease at last! I’m starting to feel a bit normal again, a bit like myself again. I’m starting to get excited now, hopefully soon I’ll start feeling movement – I think I was 18 weeks when I first felt the little pops from Rian fluttering around! To think there’s a whole person forming inside me… will it be another boy? Will he look like Rian? Will they have similar personalities? So many exciting things to wonder about!

To grow a human is so amazing, to have the chance to do it is amazing. But my God, women are pretty amazing too! Roll on the next few months of watching Bump grow and become stronger as my newest little human.