April 2017 - FET #1, The Beta

Starting Tuesday evening, my friend Katie came to stay with me and give me my progesterone shots every evening (as well at eat ice cream and watch TV, slumber party style!).  It was wonderful.  We've been close friends since elementary school, and are essentially sisters from different parents.  She lives and works about 50 miles from my house, which was really out of the way for her, but I was so glad she was willing.  There was no way I was going to be able to do my sesame oil progesterone shots comfortably on my own.  Plus, the craziness of the waiting gets exponentially worse when I'm alone.

After Thursday morning's pee test (8 days past transfer), I had a rough day.  I was beginning to think this wasn't going to work.  The chances are getting slimmer.  By this point, the pee sticks I use should be ~80% accurate.  Katie was at work.  Michael was in meetings back to back all day in Vegas.  I was feeling alone, frustrated, and fairly certain this was all about to fail.

I was sick of Netflix, of TV, even of air conditioner.  I went outside and sat on the back porch in the sun.  It was really a beautiful spring day.  Light breeze, birds singing.  I cried quietly.  I needed to let it out...all the anxiety and pent up emotional investment in this effort.  This transfer was half of our embryo inventory.  We got good news on the genetics, and all my measurements were good...why is this not working yet?

The waiting is torturous for me.  Flashback to the Friday before my transfer, when I saw a substitute acupuncturist.  The lady I usually see was on a well-deserved vacation.  The lady subbing in was from the Katy clinic, and had a more Buddhist approach to things.  She asked how things are going...and at my clinic, they mean symptoms and general mental state.  I was stressed, the transfer was less than a week away, and I was just so worried it wasn't going to work.  The exhaustion of the whole 18 month process was catching up with me, and I was just so exasperated with it all.  I either wanted to be able to do more to make this work, or I wanted to jump to the end and know what's going to happen already!

She sat back in her chair, smiled, and said, "You know, you have a strong warrior spirit!"

"Is that a nice way of saying I'm an anxiety-ridden control freak?" I said.

She chuckled, "Hahaha, no! You are strong, and that's why you've lasted this long.  Many do not.  I probably wouldn't."  She gestured at my chart and the long history of what I've been through.  "You're a fighter.  Try to remember, your 'higher self' -- some people refer to your higher self as God, but I say 'higher self' -- is doing all of this for you.  This will continue to make you who you are meant to become.  Your higher self is doing this FOR you, not TO you.  The outcome will be what it will be.  It's already in motion.  You are doing everything you can already. Try to find peace in that.  It helps sometimes to think of this as your journey to who you are meant to be."

I teared up...she was right.  It was going to be what it was going to be.  After the needles were placed, she turned on the usual music, and left the room.  My mind started to drift.  I thought of being a child and visiting Colorado in the winter time.  There are times in the deep of winter when it's exceptionally cold...-20F cold.  We would wake up early, and the valley would still be in shadow.  The cabin would be warm, but the minute we left and loaded into the old yellow Scout, my brother and I would shiver in the cold...it felt uncontrollable.  So cold.  Why were we doing this?!  It was so warm in the cabin, under the covers with the scratchy electric blanket or in our slippers by the fire.  Now, my entire being, every muscle was fighting the cold.  My father would tell us, "Just relax.  Take a deep breath, and relax into the cold.  You'll warm up and it will be fine."  It seemed impossible at first, but inevitably, we would take that deep breath of cold air, let it out very slowly, and focus on relaxing every muscle.  It would always work.  In a few moments, we would feel less cold and more in control of our little bodies.

In the acupuncture room, I'm under a heat lamp with a blanket on my pincushion legs, but I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, relaxing into the anxiety...into the stress.  And again and again...it helped.  It was going to be what it was going to be.  I'm doing everything I can.

So fast forwarding to Friday morning.  The morning of the blood test.  I got up early and peed in my little Dixie cup.  I was scheduled for the first appointment slot of the day, so hopefully there would be no delay in my results in the afternoon.  I nevertheless wanted to test before I went.  There's still a part of me that longs for some normalcy in this process...finding out in private vs. from someone else over the phone.  I've had plenty of that with all the embryo growing updates.  No offense, Michelle.

I dipped the final test in the box and counted to 5 elephants.  I waited.  I was stunned.  I could see something.  I held it to the light.  It was THERE!  I waited and it got a little darker.  The adrenaline was coursing through my veins and goosebumps were rising on my arms and neck.  It was a feeling of shock.  I cried happy tears and called Michael.  "It's positive this morning!  It's barely there, but it's POSITIVE!  This really might work!"  It was 5:45am in Vegas.  He was exhausted, but moderately happy.  He still didn't think I should be testing, but I wanted him to be the first one to know.

I ran down the hall with the test and caught Katie as she was finishing her shower.  I told her and we had a jumping up and down, super excited, tears rolling hug.  We had stayed up late the night before and I had shared my frustration and fear of nearly certain failure, but now there was evidence that this might be working.  ANY sign of a second line can be considered a positive, and she saw it, too.

I know, it's barely there, and you almost have to not look directly at it to see it.
It was darker in person, it did not photograph well, and ANY sign of a second line is defined as a positive.
It's okay if you think I'm crazy, but I did in fact have witnesses! 

I left the house with my pee stick (in a sandwich bag) in my purse and headed to my blood test.  I was feeling good about it for the first time in a few days.  I knew it might not be enough.  It could be a chemical pregnancy, given how late and light the line came in.  At least I had some confidence that there was something there to actually measure...

The call came in at 1:45pm.  Since I was feeling pretty good, and since being alone sounded pretty awful, I had gone to lunch and out to an arts festival with, Kim, one of my mother-in-laws.  The phone rang and I stepped to the side.  My nurse had a dismal tone in her voice.

She said, "I'm so sorry, Kelly.  The test came back negative."

"What?  There wasn't anything?  Zero?" I couldn't believe what I was hearing, surely there was something there...even if it is indeed bad news.

"Yes, I'm afraid so.  Dr. S says you should stop your medications.  He likes to call his patients after these tests, so he will probably be in touch later this afternoon.  He will help walk you through it and what might have happened."

"Okay.  Thank you." I said and hung up. "Can we go home now?  I don't think I can be here now.  I thought I could, but..." I explained to Kim.

We walked out of the nearby gate, and found a bench where I could sit and call Michael.  He was as devastated as I was, and asked if he should try to come home sooner...he could skip meetings and get on the next flight if he left right then...I told him no and that I would be fine until he got home.  Stick with the plan, we knew this was a possibility, and arriving home at 6am the next morning was good enough.

Kim drove me home and she and Jimmy, Michael's dad, stayed with me the rest of the evening.  It was nice not being alone.  There were two things I needed to do.  I needed to hear what the doctor had to say, and I needed to do one more test to be sure.  My eyes were pink and swollen...so much effort, pain, and money just resulted in failure...but I couldn't help but wonder which result was false.  I had heard of false positives on the pee tests, but knew they were very rare.  Before I stopped all the medicine, which was the life support for my embryo, I had to test one more time to be sure.  I drove to CVS and Dr. S called on the way.

He said there was nothing we could blame it on.  No reason he could see that it wouldn't or couldn't work.  "Just more shitty luck," he said grimly, "Everything looked great, the conditions were perfect, but there is always a chance it just won't stick, even for normal embryos it's still a bit of a coin flip for single embryo transfers.  You did absolutely everything you could.  I can tell you, it was a bummer of an afternoon in the office today.  Everyone was rooting for this to work for you guys and they are feeling this with you."

He said the only other thing he might consider is that the 24hr testing might have put some extra stress on the embryo.  "There's no data or science to support that really, I just know I've done 5 of these in the last couple of weeks, and none of them have panned out.  It was the right thing to do to test it, and if we hadn't tested it and it failed, we would probably think it was abnormal.  Unfortunately there are no easy choices or answers in these things.  What this does do, is give me some good confidence in our second embryo, which was tested normal before freeze.  If you and Michael are ok, I'd like to see us try that one with your next cycle.  If you need some emotional time off, that's perfectly fine and won't hurt anything, though."

I told him I would talk with Michael when he got home and get back with him later on what we decided.  Part of me knew instantly that an extra month (or months) of waiting to give ourselves a break wouldn't really be that restful.  We would mourn this loss longer, and we would live with the anxiety of the next big question mark for longer.  While jumping into the second (and very likely, final) FET was scary and gut-wrenchingly painful, at a bare minimum, we would have a resolution in the end.  We'd have an answer to the 18 months of trying this path and to everything we've worked for thus far.  In the cast of failure, it would at least be over and allow us to move on to another option.  I was fairly sure I knew what I wanted to do, and nearly certain Michael would support that decision.

When I got home with Kim and Jimmy, I excused myself to take the test.  I used my Dixie cup and took two different styles of test.  They were both negative.  I was ready to stop the medicine.  There was nothing more to negotiate or fight.  My warrior spirit had been defeated.

I didn't set an alarm, but woke up about the same time Michael's flight touched down.  There was a car hired to pick him up from the airport so I didn't have to, but I met him at the garage when he arrived at the house.  It was hard, and it was a long morning of crying and talking through it all before we slept.

We had rolled out the hormonal red carpet for him, but Schrodinger was lost, and we had to decide if/when we were ready to move forward.  I was still in some level of denial and grief, but knew that in the end, he wasn't meant to be our son.

Yep.  Pretty much.