For those of you who’ve heard the results of our fetal assessment scan a few days ago, to avoid confusion, let me state that I wrote this post on Thursday afternoon, the day before our scan, but never managed to complete and post it…but am posting it now…
Hi Jed. Hi Jade…how you guys doing?
Now’s when I normally apologise for not posting in ages…and then give the reason for the latest blogging hiatus…and today’s no different – I’m nothing if not consistent!
But this time, the reason is a little more exciting than normal…this time the reason wasn’t a bleak and sad delay causing a lack of comedy, it wasn’t concerns over privacy or readership, it wasn’t a pause because nothing was happening in our lives and there was nothing to say…in fact, it was exactly the opposite. The cause for the lack of blogging was the incredible fact that we are now pregnant!! Yup, we’re knocked up. Our oven is no longer devoid of buns…and that it’s twins…so we’re well and truly knocked up! Twice!!
And that has resulted in a lack of blogging.
Go figure…
Truth is, it’s not been all peachy since I last chatted to you guys. Last post was written in the ward awaiting retrieval for our third IVF cycle…and it didn’t end well. BFN…actually, I’m not watching my language this time…it was a BIG FUCKING NEGATIVE!
We weren’t happy. In fact, I was distraught – for some reason I had convinced myself that ‘third time lucky’ was going to be us…that we’d played the odds and it was now certain to be a success. I had somehow managed to con myself into knowing this 3rd IVF was definitely, no doubts about it, gonna work.
But, it didn’t, and I couldn’t believe it. I had this strange and incredulous WTF feeling. I just couldn’t believe it hadn’t worked – I was utterly shell-shocked.
So we did what most people would probably think was a crazy thing - we phoned the clinic back the day after our BFN and told them we wanted to do an IVF the very next cycle – back-to-back cycles…no breaks, no pauses to catch our breath, no time to come to terms with the failed cycle and the increasing sense that we were never going to succeed…nope…straight back in there…back on the horse, (or, more accurately) back in the stirrups. Yeeha, giddyup.
And that’s exactly what we did. And boy am I so glad we did, because for us, it was 4th time lucky…hey what do you know…it worked.
Now I could tell you all about our emotional state, how we seemed to invest so little emotionally into the fourth cycle, how for the previous 3 cycles I had all the milestones marked off in my calendar and how this time there wasn’t a single mention of it anywhere, how in the previous 3 cycles we got excited and discussed names and nursery themes and spent countless hours talking about what it would be like to have kids and how during this fourth cycle we did no such thing – it was like it was happening to other people. Once the decision was made, how we never discussed any of these things. How when the test day approached that I was convinced that this was going to be just another shitty negative in a growing line of negatives and how I was more worried about getting the two of us through dealing with two negatives in a row, as we’d never really dealt with the preceding failed cycle…but I won’t. I really believe that I had invested so much of myself emotionally in our third cycle, that I was numb after the failure and so it seemed that going straight into another cycle wouldn’t hurt as much when that one failed too. That I didn’t have the strength to get too emotionally committed to this fourth cycle.
What I will tell you is that the result of all this, was that we were totally unprepared for the positive – that we were blown away by the high and alarmingly rising beta’s – well above the triplet pregnancy beta’s on beta base! I’ll tell you how excited and scared shitless at the idea/probability of multiples we were, that we couldn’t buy anything because we didn’t know how many we would need…1, 2, 3, 4, more???
It’s been an incredible 10 or so weeks since we got THAT phone call from the clinic. It’s been an emotionally draining time. There were many tears when we walked out of the scan room from our first scan after the positive and all the clinic nurses were lined up and waiting for the results. Who would have thought that there would be tears when leaving the fertility clinic? But there were – your mom cried like a baby at the last scan at the fertility clinic when we said goodbye to our super Doctor S and discussed our hand-over to our new gynae.
The tears haven’t all been good – we had a scare with spotting early on, there have been lots of tears for friends who have had BFN’s, but by and large it has been an incredibly positive and exciting time…but with caution always there, worried about getting too excited, getting too smug in our ‘pregnancy-ness’. So, as with everything infertility related, it’s been an emotional and conflicted time.
So, you might ask, why blog now…and the truth is that tomorrow morning is our 13 week foetal assessment scan. Exciting milestone – absolutely…but why blog now when all the preceding exciting milestones have been whizzing by for the last 13 weeks without a single typed word??
And the answer to that is simple…tomorrow we will hopefully find out exactly what we’re having…we know there are two little babies in there…but we don’t know their genders…and this is a big thing!! For almost 17 months now, I’ve been writing to you guys. Granted, not as regularly as I should have, I know. But always I’ve written these posts to both of you, Jed & Jade, 1 boy and 1 girl…In this time, I’ve imagined you guys in our lives, I’ve pictured the four of us doing all sorts of things, the things a normal family does, and I’ve always pictured the two of you as a boy and a girl…and from tomorrow morning onwards, those images and pictures in my mind’s eye might all be wrong…I might need to readjust all of these daydreams and imaginings to fit in with the new reality we will be shown tomorrow morning during the scan…will it be two boys, will it be two girls, or will it still be my lovely Jed & Jade…I just don’t know.
The odds aren’t any help in this instance - there’s a 50% chance (roughly speaking) of a Jed & Jade outcome….but this means there’s a 50% chance of a different outcome - whether it’s a ‘dropping Jed for another girls name’ or ’dropping Jade for another boys name’.
And this all of a sudden seems a big deal to me. It feels like I need to get a last post in before reality can intrude. I need a last chat with the Jed & Jade that have become such a big part of my life over the last while. I need one more small moment, just the three of us, just in case my next post starts with different names…and so this is why I’m writing to you now.
I needed to tell you how important you two have become to me, how you’re helped me cope through a tough few years, how the thought of you two coming into our lives has helped me cope with the 350 plus injections, the countless embarrassing or difficult situations I’ve faced in this time, how you’ve given me the motivation to keep going, to keep trying, to keep hoping. I wanted to thank you two for giving me the end point, the dream, the reason why we’re subjecting ourselves to all we’ve been through and why we do so with a smile on our faces.
You two have been there for me to talk to when I felt like there was no-one else, you’ve allowed me a sounding board to help me understand my own thoughts, to clarify my own feelings. You’ve been the catalyst that got me writing, that keeps me writing (if somewhat erratically), that have allowed me to express things in a way that I would struggle to verbalise, and in doing all this, have helped me communicate with your mom, as well as, in some strange way, with myself.
And so, Jed, Jade…before the results come in and things might all change, I want to say a very big “Thank You”….it’s been a blast, and if things are different from tomorrow onwards, I will still always think of you two…
Image may be NSFW.
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
