WAITING TO BE EXPECTING

Can you find the "baby" in this photo? I love this picture!

We’ve been “waiting to be expecting” for longer than we’d like. And these next particular 12 days of “waiting to be expecting” are by far, the longest and hardest we’ve ever experienced.

I think nearly all would agree that the most agonizing time of any IVF cycle is the two-week-wait after your Embryo Transfer. After your IVF transfer, you have to wait 12 days before you go back in for a blood test to reveal if you are pregnant or not. The constant poking and prodding is replaced by a big void you have to fill while under instructions to rest and relax. Talk about cruelty. It’s about the worst thing you can do to a wannabe parent! It’s like someone telling you, “Just wait 288 hours and you’ll know.” What? 288 hours. That’s like forever! And relax…yeah right. The thing that would relax me the most right now is to drink a few glasses of wine, but that’s obviously not an option. So what now? I just pray and pray and pray and find myself hoping these little babies really will make a nice cozy home in my uterus.

You try to completely trust in your body and God. That together they’ll make these babies survive implantation. I prayed and prayed, but I found this difficult because this time I was desperately praying for what I was wanting so badly, not for what God wanted for me. If we could be assured that once, just once we’d become pregnant, this waiting game would be a little less stressful. But of course there are no guarantees and no magic ball showing the outcome. So we just keep playing the waiting game until our day comes.
After IVF, you are advised to stay away from doing any activities involving twisting or not to lift anything over 25 pounds. Every sudden move I made, I thought maybe I shook those babies right out of place. I thought maybe I should just lay around in bed all day in order for maximum results! I’m not even kidding when I say I didn’t want to pee too hard, laugh too hard, or sneeze too hard! One day, my niece, Cora, jumped on my lower stomach while I was laying on the floor. I imagined the embryos shooting right out from my uterus, through my vagina. Ahh, scary! I sure hope those babies held on tight!

Now that I think of it, someone should really invent a way to be frozen in time, just sleeping or something, and then be woken up right when it was time for the results. How sweet would that be!? But since that can’t be done, I guess we just continue our 288 hours of “waiting to be expecting.”