Finding a fellow traveller

Remember "gaydar?" The little bell that goes off in the heads of the gay and gay-friendly that makes you think somebody is part of the community, a fellow traveller? That little something? Do you think infertiles have something similar? (What would we call it? Inf-dar? Bar-dar? ART-dar?) Because I did the strangest thing this afternoon.

I hold my cards pretty close to the vest regarding the whole IVF-thing. Neither my family nor R's knows that Small Boy and Boychen are IVF/FET babies (though sometimes I think R's mom might suspect). Some of our good friends know - three we told during the process, people we'd been friends with for over a decade and who stood up for us at our US wedding; but Small Boy was one before I told Dutch Friend and two before I told Australian Friend. I don't mind people knowing, but I don't broadcast it. As I said, I hold my cards pretty close to the vest.

Today I was at a playgroup some of the expat moms have been trying to get off the ground forever and talking with a new woman; I had come into the conversation late and she and Australian Friend were talking about how hard twins would have been and we don't know how we would have done it. But then we all agreed that we would have done it because it is what it is, and you just do it. Especially twins with a first (successful) pregnancy - you don't have any basis of comparison and infants are just hard anyway. And then we all agreed that twins the second time around would be really hard and I said - to a woman I'd just met five minutes ago - that when we were trying to get pregnant with the Small Boy I was willing to risk twins with a two-embryo transfer but the second time around, with Boychen, we only ever considered single embryo transfers. It just slipped out of mouth with all the natural ease in the world.

And she said, that's what we're doing too.

Whoa.

Her child is an IVF baby too. We have different REs but they use the same lab and she knows Herr G, the Labmeister, too; we agreed he's a super-nice guy. (Did I ever mention that after my last transfer - the Boychen transfer - we hung around with Herr G chatting about cycling, the Tour de France, Lance Armstrong, and Fabian Cancellara? Well we did.) What a small world. And how strange that I would have picked that moment, with that woman, to say something that honestly I never introduce into conversation.

What do you think, fellow ART-ers? Do you think we have an "ART-dar?" Has yours ever tingled? And were you right?

The funny part of packing

I just found three months worth of birth control in my bathroom.

Hahahahahahahahahahha

The longest day...

...is the last day before your blood draw (pregnancy test).

I've been getting weird crampies since Friday evening and I suspect the hormones are the only thing holding off my period, so I'm not looking for good news tomorrow. At this point, I just want news so that I can get on with my life; so that R and I can get on with our lives.

Speaking of Friday evening, R and I spent the night in a hotel! Grossmutti - henceforth to be known as Bahdee, since that's Small Boy's name for her - spent the night in our apartment with the Small Boy, and R and I spent the night in a hotel. Sans Boy. The whole night. Away. Sans Boy. Okay, we stayed in town and could have been home in 10 minutes if things fell apart, but we were not. in. the. apartment. Now, R has spent quite a few nights away - on business trips or in the Army - and I have spent a whole two non-consecutive nights away from the Small Boy, but we have never as a unit spent a night away from the Boy. It went great. We'll be doing that again.

Answering some questions/comments on earlier FET posts and an informationless update

There were some interesting questions burried in the comments to this post and I'm finally getting around to addressing them. Sorry it took me so long; I seem to have spent the past several weeks in something of a black hole.

Junebee asked: So how come you didn't just go to the U.S.?

For the initial IVF we didn't consider going to the US until we ran at least one cycle here to see how things went. There is so much stress and emotional turmoil in an IVF that I really didn't want to do it 6 time zones away from R if I didn't have to. Nor did I want to add an international flight and extended hotel stay to an already expensive procedure (which may be the one thing I've found that is actually cheaper in Switzerland, by the way). And how would I explain my long absence to the in-laws? With a fairly straightforward male factor diagnosis it didn't seem urgent to find a clinic that was allowed to use all the tools in the IVF toolkit, since in theory we don't need all the tools in the IVF toolkit. So we started here in Switzerland with Dr. L, who came highly recommended by my beloved OB/GYN Dr. Fantabulous. And we were successful on the first IVF, with frozen eggs in storage; naturally it made sense when we came to FET time to go to Dr. L again. It wasn't until half way through FET #3 that I fully realized the restrictions he's working with and at that point, well, in for a penny in for a pound. I'll be honest, at 38 I'm not interesting in running a fresh IVF cycle in any country - the first cycle was pretty rough and I over stimulated - and as I've said before my emotional reserves are running low; we're nearing the end of this road one way or the other. I don't think I have a fresh cycle in me. And of course, with the Small Boy cycling in the US now becomes a logistical and financial impossibility; or a nightmare at least.

Elizabeth said: Presumably these laws are to ensure that there is absolutely no movement toward "genetic engineering", no chance that parents could select embryos based on testing for genetic flaws?
and asked: Does this change your feelings at all about transferring two embryos?

Elizabeth, yes the restrictions are specifically designed to rule out any possibility of genetic engineering. Embryo grading, even waiting to see if they stop developing in the lab on their own, is perceived as the first step on a slippery slope. It's a bit inconsistent, though, because amnio to test for genetic conditions is legal in Switzerland and it is legal to abort a fetus based on amnio results. But we can't make the same decision about the pregnancy at the 8 cell stage. Huh?? How exactly does that make sense?

Our new understanding of frozen fertilized eggs v. frozen embryos didn't change our feelings about the number of embryos to transfer because at the end of the day R and I are still mildly terrified at the prospect of twins; and it turned out to be irrelevant anyway since we didn't have two to work with in the end.

Colorsonmymind asked: Now if neither looks good by day two will they defrost 2 more so you don't miss the cycle?

Yep, as seen by our bus crash, they just kept defrosting until they had something to transfer. So at least there's that.

And as for the update, I'm one week into the dreaded two week wait - that means the blood draw is a week from today - and I couldn't begin to guess what's going on down there. We'll work on the no news is good news theory for now.

Half-a-Chance lived!

Just got an email from R. He talked to lab-meister Herr G, who told him that Half-a-Chance continued to divide at a satisfactory pace and has been frozen for a future FET.

Transfer day, or Last Chance at the OK Corral

Well. Today was embryo transfer and it's a good news/bad news situation. The good news is that we transfered back a single four-celled embryo. We haven't seen a four-celled embryo since the cycle that gave us Small Boy. So yay! Four cells on day two. You go, little embryo.

Bad news is that it took a lot to get that embryo. You know how R and I called our frozen ones our "hockey team?" Well, in keeping with the analogy it appears our team bus got rammed by a tractor-trailer on the way to the big game. Up until now we've defrosted two fertilized eggs (no, not embryos, fertilized eggs as I have recently come to understand) per transfer; one has looked good enough to transfer and the second has ultimately stopped dividing - i.e, it died. So the two failed FETs have cost us four fertilized eggs. Today's cost us six. Our last six, for those of you not keeping track at home (what, you're not keeping track?). Four apparantly looked like crap from the get-go, one looks so-so and we're supposed to call the lab tomorrow to see if it survived long enough to re-freeze, and one divided to the four-cell stage and is now floating in the vastness of my uterus looking for a wall (Left! Turn left!). So at best, there will be one embryo tomorrow instead of the four I always delusionally imagined there would be.

I said in this post that this may well be our last FET regardless of the outcome, but I never imagined this particular outcome; it simply never occured to me that we'd hit a cycle in which we blew through six fertilized eggs to transfer one. (It's slowly dawning on me that a whole lot of things never occurred to me. The remarkable first time out of the gate Small Boy succcess seems to have left me overly optimistic and rather uninformed. As a result I've hit a steep learning curve these past two weeks, and it has not been fun. But at least I don't feel like an infertility fraud anymore.) I never imagined not having the choice; in that same post I wrote about how important it is to me to feel that I have some choice in this, some control, that stopping even though we still had embryos - excuse me, fertilized eggs - was an important part of my ability to feel content - pleased and delighted, even - with the shape of my family. Now that option, always a selfish option, I admit, may not be there; we'll know tomorrow morning what happened to Half-a-Chance. And we'll know in two weeks what happened to Last Chance.

I need to think about how I feel about all of this. I am angry, surely, that the Swiss laws have put us through a roller-coaster that we would have avoided in the States. We would have known from the start that we really only had 2 or 3 embryos at best to work with in a FET; we wouldn't have undergone procedures for which there was no hope in the first place. Just two days in the lab would have saved us a whole lot of emotional energy, to say nothing of time and money. I know the logic behind the Swiss laws, logic with which R and I happen to disagree, and that's a topic for a post sometime. I'm too angry right now to write it, and I don't want to be angry. It's a beautiful early spring day here at the foot of the Swiss Alps, and there is a four-celled embryo in my uterus, and I just want to try to think about that today.

***

I saw a pregnant woman, heavily pregnant, outside the clinic as I was walking in for the transfer this morning. I saw a pregnant woman at the clinic the day of the Small Boy transfer, too.

FET update, or In which I discover I have been laboring under a serious misapprehension

So. I had an ultrasound this afternoon to check my uterine lining. In a word it's a "beaut." (Specifically it measures 10.9 mm - the thickest yet - with a triple stripe and my Patent Pending Perfect Shape. But this post is so not about that.) And yes, my Swiss RE really used the word "beaut." He said, in fact, "It's always a beaut" (oh, you flatterer you) to which I replied, "For all the good it seems to do me" to which he replied "We just need to find a good embryo." Ah. And therein lies the rub; because let me tell you, I have been operating under a serious misapprehension concerning the process here in Switzerland. Very, very serious. So serious, and so misapprehended, that it's almost embarassing even to post this.

I have always known that doing an IVF and/or FET in Switzerland entailed more restrictions than the same procedures in the US, restrictions that generally work to lower your chances of a successful outcome. For example, pre-transfer genetic diagnostics are not permitted in Switzerland, although that should change some time before the last glacier melts; embryo grading is not permitted; no more than two embryos can be transfered; and all transfers are performed on day two, which is to say generally before one would discover if the embryo was going to stop dividing on its own. Because we wouldn't want to, you know, improve my chances or anything by weeding out the ones that were never going to make it anyway.* (And speaking of restrictions, let's say nothing of the fact that only heterosexual married couples under a certain age which I'm too lazy to verify right now but I think it's 41 for women and 55 for men can avail themselves of reproductive technology. Though to my knowledge Dr L's office never actually confirmed that R and I are married- a simple matter of requesting the Familienbuchlein - which given that R and I have different legal last names and different insurance carriers seems a bit odd.) Given the restrictions he's working under, Dr L's 33% success rate is downright astounding but compares unfavorably with many a US clinic.

I knew all this going in to the initial IVF and was more than willing to start here, especially given our relatively straightforward male factor diagnosis. In the back of my mind I did think that if things went repeatedly wrong I would consider travelling to the US for a cycle. But we cycled here. Let's refresh. In 2004 we did an IVF cycle in which 18 eggs were retreived. Twelve of those 18 eggs were successfully fertilized. From those twelve fertilized eggs, two were transferred to my uterus on day 2 and the remaining 10 were frozen. The unspoken end of that last sentence, in my mind, has always been "...on day two," meaning they were frozen at the two- or four-celled stage when at least some preliminary information could be gathered about them. Are they well-balanced? Do they exhibit fragmentation? Are they otherwise funky? So that, when it came time to defrost them for the FETs the lab would at least be able to select the better-looking ones, or the less funky ones, to the extent that making judgements like "better looking" or "not too funky" is even permitted in a Swiss lab (and really, it's not).

Um, no. No, no, no. No, they don't do that at all. They freeze the fertilized egg. They inject sperm into the egg, confirm that the egg has in fact fertilized, and freeze it bang! right then. For the IVF back in 2004 they just randomly selected which two of the 12 fertilized eggs they would not freeze and let those two divide until the day two transfer. (Which, when you think about it, makes the fact that it worked the first time all the more astounding.) The rest they froze. So now, when we're at the FET stage, they know nothing about the eggs they're selecting. They defrost two. No way of knowing which one might stop dividing anyway. No way of even beginning to select one that looks more promising than its slackard neighbor. Pick an egg, any egg. Eggs. They froze fertilized eggs. I can't believe I am only just now learning this. The FET is utterly and completely random. They're not permitted to do anything that might improve upon sheer luck.**

Now, I know it's utterly and completely random in nature, too, for you people who reproduce via sex and all and involves a great deal of sheer luck. But you're not paying 2,000 Swiss Francs, are you? Twelve bucks for a bottle of Chianti would pretty much cover it in nature, I'm guessing. I'm not sure what finally understanding this changes, if anything. Would I really have traveled to the US for that very first IVF cycle? Certainly not. Would I have skipped these FETs and done another fresh cycle? Well, yes, perhaps. Or so I thought until R pointed out to me the total randomness of a fresh cycle as well. Pick an egg, any egg. So coming belatedly to this full understanding changes nothing but this: now I can't help but think that, given my consistently beautiful uterus, if we were doing this if the US , if we lived in the US, where they could grade and select embryos, I'd be pregnant already.

How's that for an expat story?

* Yes, there is of course the theory that an embryo that stopped dividing in the lab may well have continued dividing in the more hospitable environment of the uterus. There are REs in the US who perform day 2 transfers because they believe it's better to transfer the embryos back to the uterus as early as possible. It may very well be true. It's all a crap-shoot in the end, isn't it?

** Aside from getting us twelve fertilized eggs, which is twelve more than we ever managed on our own, of course. I'm not completely unmindful of that.

I cannot want what I might not get

You’d never know by reading this blog that we’re in the middle of our third attempt at a frozen embryo transfer; this has been my sole post on the matter so far. For the past week I’ve been taking my Progynova on schedule – I’m up to 2mg 2xday – and otherwise not really thinking about it*. I can’t afford to get too hopeful; I don’t think I can afford too much disappointment. In this post Elizabeth makes a great comment on the difference between generic hope and specific hope:

“I have been depressed and angry about my infertility before. I have cried before over how much I want a child and how unfair life can be. But I don't think I have ever been so saddened by the end of a specific cycle. I think it was because I have never allowed myself to have so much hope for a specific cycle. Usually, I cling to a safe, generic hope that eventually I will have a child of my own (and I include adoption in that scenario, an adopted child would be a child of my own).”

I know all about the generic hope. Three years ago this time I was preparing to begin my first IVF. At the time I believed that we would ultimately be successful though I was quite certain that our first attempt would fail. In fact, we were so certain that it had failed that when Frau S from Dr L’s office called R’s cell phone with my blood test results we didn’t take the call because we were about to get on the Autobahn and we didn’t want to have to drive home in the wake of bad news. We were so sure it was going to be bad news that we drove all the way back to Small Village before returning the call. When Frau S gave us the news – a beta of 361 at 14dp2dt: very definitively pregnant – and told us to drive back to the city to see Dr. L we didn’t really quite believe it. I don’t think I believed it until we saw the heartbeat a few weeks later. I’d always believed that eventually there would be a baby, but didn’t have the emotional strength to believe that specific IVF attempt would result in a specific pregnancy. If anything, I talked myself into anticipating a failure. Hope seemed too emotionally risky; it still feels that way. To believe that an FET will eventually work – I can do that. To believe that this specific FET will work, that I will be pregnant at Thanksgiving and that there will be an early December baby, that hope is too specific and too detailed. It opens the door to a specific and detailed pain. I hold myself at arm’s length from myself.

I’m also aware that I’m walking on a border that I cannot afford to cross. I need to stay on this side, in this country I live in. In this country I am happy, I am content, and the shape of my family pleases me, it is warm and comfortable and good. In this country I see the three of us still being a threesome ten years from now and I smile. In this country I would welcome a second child with a happy heart but I also know that today, right now, if we never have another child I’ll still be happy. Not just okay, but happy. But the harder we try for a second child, the more I dream that child into being, the harder it becomes to say that my family feels complete. Then, if the second child never comes I will have played away my contentment and I will always miss somebody I will never meet. Then ten years from now we will be a threesome but I will feel a shadow over my shoulder. Once I cross over into that other land, into that land where we are a family of three but no longer by choice, once I play away this deep contentment I have, what then? I cannot give my heart over to something that may never be, for once I cross over into that other land, I’m not sure there is an exit visa.

For that same reason, this may very well be our last FET no matter how it turns out. If we keep trying and keep failing I will one day find that I’m missing my never to be second child. And that is a country I cannot afford to live in.

* Ultrasound on Friday afternoon to check my lining

Third verse, same as the first

Cycle day 3 blah blah blah, Progynova 2mg/day blah blah blah, ultrasound some time next week blah blah, hopefully transfer mid-March blah blah blah.

Yeah, we're trying again. 'Cuz if I keep beating that horse, one of these days it's going to get up and run.

Beta results

On the up-side, I can:

• resume consumption of vast quantities of proper coffee
• have a guilt-free Diet Coke
• order a beer with my Indian food
• stop eating sardines
• take some drugs to kill the last of The Cold That Would Not Die
• have some drinks during the upcoming Fasnacht festivities (link in Bernese Dialket - it's worth clicking through just to see how different Dialekt can be from German)

On the down-side, well, there's that whole I'm not pregnant thing.

Day 13 and all quiet on the southern front

Blood test tomorrow morning. No blood or spotting or, well, anything so far. Okay, I've got a negative HPT but we all know those things suck, right? Right?

Right?

Hmm

I saw something that looked suspiciously like a wee spot of blood on the Crinone applicator this morning, and then I made myself stop looking and quickly shoved it into a plastic bag and into the trash.

Sigh.

Grasping

I was leafing through some back issues of The Sun magazine looking for prose poems - for I am sure I have read prose poems in The Sun - to read for this week's Poetry Thursday, and I found a poem in the Septmber 2006 issue by Stuart Kestenbaum. It's called Litany, and you can read it here, and it ends like this:

"Bless each cell, which is its own universe, ready to divide, split in two, and make more than enough."

I napped again yesterday, and again today, and I remember that I never had a minute's morning sickness with Small Boy. The only time during that entire pregnancy I threw up was when I came down with stomach flu at 34 weeks and then I threw up so much that it triggered contractions and I spent several days in the hospital hoping not to have a baby just yet. But I did sleep. Lord did I sleep. I slept in bed, I slept on the couch, I fell asleep on the train. I slept so much that one friend of mine actually thought I had spent the month of June in the States. I slept through much of July as well, drifting off in the afternoons with the Tour de France humming in the background, slept while Lance Armstrong brought L'Alpe d'Huez to its knees. I slept through the entire first trimester, slept fourteen, sixteen hours a day.

Three naps in three days is meaningless; I'm napping during the day because I'm not sleeping at night, because Small Boy has been sick and sleeping in our bed or waking early or both, because I'm sick and worn down, because the beans in the coffee machine are decaf and oh! let us bless caffeine. Three naps in three days is meaningless, but let me grasp this straw.

And bless each cell.

Embryo pictures and informationless update

We transfered the embryo on the left. The two cells are well balanced, but you can see some fragmentation (that little cluster of bubbles at the top is something you don't really want to see). The embryo on the right has no fragmentation, but the two cells are rather unbalanced, and Herr G is of the opinion that poor balance is worse than light fragmentation, so we went with the one on the left. Today we learned that the unbalanced embryo - the one we did not transfer - did not continue to develop in the lab, so it was not re-frozen. So Herr G was right.

For those who are counting, this leaves us with one embryo on the playing field and six sitting on the bench.

I wouldn't expect to feel anything 4 days after transfer; and I don't. I did take a nap with Small Boy this afternoon, but extreme tiredness is the status quo around here, so I don't think that means anything either. So I can't even begin to guess what's going on down there. Just taking my meds and crossing my fingers.

Poetry Thursday - changes

I haven't taken part in Poetry Thursday in a few months, but today's theme of change certainly fits in with what's going on in my life today. I've been writing practice poems lately, little three minute three-liners from a Natalie Goldberg exercise, so what follows is anything but perfect and polished. The final image lacks originality, but it is exactly where I find myself today.

Change

One embryo
two cells
poised on the knife-point of change

You can read more changes here.

Back from the transfer

Embryo transfer was this morning. When we arrived in the lab, Herr G, Dr L's lab man, threw us a little complication. They had defrosted two embryos (to transfer one embryo you want to defrost two to make sure at least one of them survives the thaw and looks good). They did this last time, too, and one embryo looked good and one didn't. No problem. This time around, Herr G was quite pleased with both embryos and asked us if we still only wanted to transfer one or if we should transfer both. This should have been a no-brainer - R and I are both fairly terrified at the though of twins on top of the energy of Small Boy, and at 38 and knowing I wouldn't be able to take it very easy (see above, Small Boy) I'm not wildly excited about risking a twin pregnancy. So this should have been a no-brainer, but I'm feeling fairly pessimistic about this cycle - needing to extend the Progynova, being sick, not sleeping well because the Small Boy has a Big Cough, knowing that my body is really run down at the moment. Herr G let R and I talk a few minutes, and in the end we did stick with our decision to just transfer the one, but I don't have 100% confidence in this decision. The success rates on FETs are so low, we probably should have tried to boost the odds a bit. But I'm truly not prepared for twins. In the end we transferred a two-celled embryo with nicely balanced cells and light fragmentation and in two weeks we'll see how it went.

I'm spending the day on the couch catching up on blogs, reading, watching my favorite winter sport and hopefully napping a bit. Small Boy is at The Farm, R is at work, and I'm just going to lie here doing nothing. I've been needing to do this for a long time and am glad the transfer gives me the excuse to sit here and be totally unproductive. Or perhaps reproductive.

Out sick

Sorry for the lack of posting, but everybody is sick over here (even the grandparents!) and I'm just trying to keep my head above water until Thursday when we do transfer. I don't feel particularly good about doing an embryo transfer when my body feels wrung out and run over, but it's not a good reason to cancel. But I have to say, it doesn't fill me with optimism. I'm just hoping that by Thursday the grandparents are well enough to take Small Boy for the day so that I can bed rest after the transfer. And I'm hoping to feel well enough to not mourn the loss of NyQuil.

Random bullets of frozen embryo transfer

• Waiting for my appointment is much more enjoyable - well, less annoying anyway - with an iPod. How I made it through the initial IVF without an MP3 player of any kind is a mystery to me.
• Speaking of waiting, how is it that although I appeared to be the first appointment of the morning - I mean, the lights were not even on in the waiting room yet and both doors to Dr L's inner sanctum were open - I still had to wait?
• But I didn't have to wait long.
• Dr L was efficient as ever.
• No matter how long I live in Switzerland, I will never get used to taking off my pants and delicates in that corner of the room and casually strolling naked from the waist down over to the examination table in this corner of the room. While Dr L waits on his little stool.
• Which reminds me that one day I must blog the culture shock of a Swiss OB/GYN appointment.
• But I must say, trans-vaginal ultrasounds are so not a big deal after the whole giving birth thing.
• Once again Dr L did not tell me what my lining measured at, but I read the monitor clearly this time:7.78 mm
• No, that's not really the kind of number I wanted to see.
• I do, however, have a triple stripe.
• Dr L seemed amused when I asked if I was triple-striped.
• You crazy Americans, he was probably thinking, always wanting all these details.
• But he humoured me and showed me the layers on the ultrasound monitor and explained what was where.
• He also said my uterus was excellently shaped.
• Yeah, that's a direct quote. I have an "excellently shaped" uterus. I think I'll put it on my CV.
• We'll pretend to forget that he was positively delighted with my uterus last time, too.
• Because we all know how that worked out.
• Now since 7.78mm is not really the kind of number we wanted to see, and because 17 days of this are not boring enough, we're sneaking in three extra days of Progynova before transfer to help boost my lining.
• Woo hoo.
• I need more time on the Progynova because my lining isn't as thick as it was at this point in the cycle last time.
• And we all know how how last time worked out.
• Wait.
• I'm supposed to be thinking postive.
• That's all right! That's okay! I'm gonna get knocked up one day!
• Erhum. Yes. Well. Moving on.
• Transfer will be on Feb 8th instead of the 5th.
• (Because my body isn't quite ready yet.)
• On the upside, it means R won't be out of town for the transfer as he might have been on the 5th.
• On the downside, it means I'm not responding all that well to the Progynova.
• I'm thinking I'm going to be on the wrong side of 20%.
• Again.
• You know, it is incredibly difficult to conceal from a two year old boy the fact that you are eating cake. It can be done, but the furtive nature of the enterprise seriously minimizes the pleasure one can derive from the cake.

Caffeine, anyone?

Hmmm. Based on the number of coffee creamers no longer in the fridge, it would seem that R and I consumed 19 cups of coffee between 11am Friday and right now, 11 am on Monday. Gah! It's possible that Small Boy drank a few creamers over the weekend- when he sees us pouring creamers into our coffee he likes to get a creamer in his milk - drawing the total number of cups of coffee down to perhaps 15, but still. Gah!

And I'm supposed to go caffeine-free soon?

Gah!

Booooorrrrrring

Misschrisc is right, FETs are dead boring. Really. I can report that I'm now taking Progynova twice a day, for a total of 4mg, and I have an appointment for an ultrasound to measure my lining on Wednesday. If things look good on Wednesday there will probably be a transfer on Monday (Feb 5). Once again we'll transfer a single frozen embryo because I am not prepared in any way for the possibility of twins. And yes, one can have twins from a single embryo but come on. As long as we're talking about what is theoretically possible, one could also run away with George Clooney. But come on.

So here I am, taking my Progynova and feeling fairly hopeless about it all. Twenty percent chance of success and what. But I'll do what Dr L says, and we'll see in mid- to late-February how this all turns out.

But twenty percent. We're not holding our collective breath over here.