Two days to go

Well, here we go. After months and months of waiting, which included 45 days of menstrual misery as my body trolled me in between egg collection and the beginning of my pre-transfer cycle, my first frozen embryo is due to be transferred on Thursday.

We’ve got everything planned: on Friday we’ll drive to Cornwall, to a little chalet overlooking the sea, where we will spend a week roaming and playing music and drawing and very definitely not lifting anything heavy or eating nice cheese.

In the meantime, I am lurching between extreme optimism – “OMG I’m getting pregnant this week” – and extreme negativity – “there is no way my body will ever carry a child”.

These swings are interspersed by periods of intense Googling: I can’t help obsessively reading IVF stories and trying to figure out why they went wrong. She has blocked fallopian tubes and it didn’t work – but did she have endometriosis too? No one ever says what goes wrong. I need to know, dammit.

J and I keep having nightmares. Just as we did in the weeks leading up to our wedding, we have both been jolting awake drenched in sweat on a fairly regular basis. My dreams are pretty straightforward: I’m pregnant for eight months but then realise I don’t have a bump or I go into labour but nothing ever comes out or I go to the clinic for the transfer and they cheerfully tell me it’s going to be another five-week wait. J is more… innocent. He dreams about monsters and ghouls and things that go bump in the night.

Meanwhile, the kindness of those around me has been profound. Because I’ve been so determined to talk about this, everywhere I go people are sending me their love. I keep getting messages from friends and family: “we’re thinking about you”. It is overwhelmingly nice. I don’t want to let them down.

And all the while, the spectre of the pregnancy test looms. I’ve developed a pathological fear of peeing on sticks. I can’t imagine what it feels like to see two lines in that little window.

Above everything, I am scared of the fact that, more likely than not, I will have to go through this all – the heartbreak, the drugs, the endless, endless waiting – again. I genuinely don’t know if I have the strength.