The Pregnancy Paradox

As I write this blog post, I am currently one week, 6 days pregnant. Before you start getting excited and congratulating me, my embryo transfer isn't actually for another six days so there isn't actually anyone in there yet. I'm in this strange mystical stage between being and not being. Is this the point where you're a little bit pregnant?

The reason for my current unpregnancy is because of the way pregnancies are dated. Normal women can't usually pinpoint the exact hour when their offspring were conceived. Normal women don't have regular cycles where they ovulate on Day 14 to allow for an exact gestational age to be calculated. Normal people forget or don't keep track of these things or assume that Tab A fitting into Slot B is all you need to do to get knocked up. Normal people sometimes fudge things, as House so sagely told us, everybody lies; how do the doctors know you conceived when you said you probably did?

So they date pregnancies from the woman's Last Monthly Period and assume most people will ovulate about two weeks after the start of the bleed. This is, of course, wildly inaccurate since you can have a woman with a 30 day cycle who ovulates on Day 19 or a woman with a 28 day cycle who ovulates on Day 11. But this is how it's done. And IVF pregnancies get the same treatment.

Even though I know their exact age, the simple act of them making contact with my body ages them by two weeks. I suspect it's this concept which has been acting on Mr Click over the past decade we've spent together because he went grey very quickly after we got together!

Not only are my embryos magical beings who can survive in suspended animation, they're time travelling as well!

Yesterday we had our hospital appointment in Glasgow to check how I've been responding to the medication I'm on. Answer: well enough to move on to the next stage. My lining was sitting at a happy 7.3mm (they like anything over 6mm, preferably 7mm to progress onto the drugs to prepare the body for transfer).

I was sent away with a fantastic goody bag. No, seriously, look at what was in it:

Not pictured there is my sharps bucket into which the contents of that bag on the right hand side will be going as they're used (along with the preloaded Clexane syringes too) and the Progynova tablets I'm already taking.

Oh yeah, that's about two-three weeks supply just there. Most of these will be taken until I'm twelve weeks pregnant. Yikes!

At the time we left the hospital we didn't know for sure how many days pregnant I could count at that very minute. We'd been told the transfer was likely to be on the Thursday or Friday. I've spent the past three weeks planning for a Friday transfer and hoping it would fall on the 26th just in time for putting my feet up and chilling for the Bank Holiday weekend, the idea that it could fall on a Thursday as well called for some readjustments to my plans!

So we headed into town, and had lunch, and travelled back; the whole time I had a vice-like grip on my phone ready for the Embryologist calling. It came in a little after 4:30pm. Thursday.

And even though my embryos are neither defrosted nor in me, that means that I am unofficially pregnant right now. And by this time next week I will be classed as 'PUPO', an awful acronym which means 'Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise'.

Keep everything crossed!