Once more unto the breach

We have an appointment with Dr. L tomorrow to discuss a Frozen Embryo Transfer (hereafter, FET).

(Previously, on The Xpat Files: We have a diagnosis of male factor infertility. Small Boy was born after an IVF cycle which left us with ten frozen embryos - affectionately known as The Hockey Team - to use in any future attempts to get me pregnant.)

In light of my current I'm a horrible role model for my child self indulgent pity party, and oh by the way Small Boy has decided that 5 am is a super duper wake-up time and I drink 5 or 6 cups of real coffee a day just to survive, the timing seems a bit, shall we say, imperfect. The thing about infertility, however, is that - on top of everything else - the luxury of family planning and child spacing is stolen from you. If you work under the assumption that the treatment will fail (and FET only has about a 15% to 20% success rate, so this is the assumption you have to work under), you have to jump into treatment earlier than perhaps, in a perfect world, you'd like. If you work under the assumption that the treatment will succeed on the first attempt, well then you, my friend, live in a world far more optimistic than the one I inhabit. It must be nice there. Say you wait until the timing is perfect and the treatment fails, and so does the next one, and so does the next one. Then what? No, in the world of the imperfect, starting too early beats starting too late in my book.

There is no right timing with infertility. There is certainly no perfect.

There is a child, or there is not.