Are you good at hurdle races? I hope I am.

Feel odd today. Up and down. I am excited, about the prospect of becoming pregnant. I feel confident that this will work for us - in time. Assuming we can remain strong enough to give it a decent try (e.g. 12 months).

Feel absolutely sick with nerves at the scariness ahead though. IVF is basically a series of hurdles you have to get over. Obviously the scheduling was one, though I didn't realise that until it went wrong. From now on, I see the hurdles as thus:

1. Scan on the 25th, needs to show no cysts and thin lining, need to be ready to inject.

IF I am indeed ready to inject the next hurdle is a big one, and one I have real potential at failing.

2. Scan to assess fsh injection affect, i.e. follicle growth. I suspect mine will be slow, and will need longer than the usual one week only. I hope that I do have SOME growth though.

This leads to the next hurdle:

3. Do I have enough follicles EVENTUALLY? Even if slow, will I have a decent number. If not, I could be cancelled and this would be extremely distressing. Any of these hurdles causing us to stumble will be devastating. To not even get the chance... ugh. So, responding effectively.

Assuming I do relatively okay, the next hurdle is OPU.

4. How many eggs are retrieved? We want a decent number. 10 would be brilliant! We only need one to put back, but we want a few to choose the best from, and some may not progress and I would love to have some frozen to avoid another long cycle if this one fails. So number of eggs.

Assuming we pass that hurdle and get a few eggs at least; we then need to:

5. Fertilisation. Need to get them to fertilise, hope that they don;t sit and refuse to socialise with the sperm. Hope like hell they fertilise. Often, many do not. Again, we'd like one beauty to transfer, and a few for the freezer and expect some not to make it any further as well.

After fertilisation, we want:

6. The embryos to continue developing. So cell division, not just not growth... Again, I expect we could lose some here. And it depends what stage of development they reach. The more they grow, the better their chance of sticking. Would love some top grade, beautiful embies. Please.

Assuming this goes ok, we then transfer one and freeze (hopefully) lots more. The final hurdle is the biggest.

7. Implantation. We need any transferred embryo to burrow in and implant into the uterine lining, thereby making us pregnant, as shown by a blood test 2 weeks after transfer.


There are so many chances for failing. It literally makes me feel sick to think about. It will be good to complete one cycle, negative or positive, to tell us whether there are any other issues we didn;t yet know about at the egg quality or fertilisation stage. If not, then we can expect to get there eventually.

I feel exhausted just thinking about it!!! The biggest thing I think, is to get lots of good eggs. If this happens, it makes failing at the latter stages a LITTLE less likely (assuming we've on issues with fertilisation).

So scared.