One year on from our embryo transfer

And how two Superdrug pregnancy tests momentarily broke my heart

If how we spend our days is how we spend our lives (who was it who said that?) then my life at the moment is obsessively checking WhatsApp, looking wistfully at old photos for evidence that my hair was once nice, and dipping slightly soft, slightly out of date Carrs water biscuits into peanut butter.

I did say I’d write about my embryo transfer almost exactly a year ago. I looked back to see if I’d actually written about it before on here, and while it seems that I went through some of the details of the first one (unsuccessful) writing in detail about the second one probably felt a bit too groundhog day so soon after.

Joab and I celebrated the success of that second embryo transfer at 7am last Saturday, just by remembering the significance of June 7th. We were visiting his parents in the West Midlands, our baby between us having woken at 5am, a baby who very rarely can be lulled back to sleep once the light starts creeping in through the blinds.

Last year on June 7th we were at an IVF clinic in Elstree having our second embryo transfer.

Afterwards, we took the train into St Pancras and headed to McDonald’s. People on IVF forums seem to see eating their fries as a crucial part of transfer day, the magic ingredient to boost the chances of a positive pregnancy test. Obviously, this is a mad thing to believe, but when I was going through IVF I drank all the Kool-Aid and tended to cling to various nonsense theories. Any excuse to eat McDonald’s fries, but I called them medicine that day.

Afterwards, we walked from King’s Cross to Farringdon, where we ate lunch at The Eagle pub. I think I had a steak sandwich and a small glass of white wine, and then we headed home to make dinner and watch television with my sons.

A few days later we headed to Cadiz in Spain with two good friends. I sat on the beach and admired my fuller-than-normal boobs. It must have been all the injections, all the drugs. I’ve forgotten what exactly I was taking. Progesterone and something else. Injections, and pessaries. Messy, messy, messy.

I was a bad holiday companion to all, but I was treated with kindness.

Joab said: “You’ll probably feel better if you come out of the bedroom.”

I found the time between lunch and dinner, which was usually peak reading and lazing around and drinking beer time, particularly hard. The hours stretched out menacingly and made my brain fizz as I questioned whether I would, or would not be pregnant. I wanted to drink vermouth with the gang, but also, I couldn’t ignore the advice from the IVF clinic to avoid alcohol, sea swimming, and the midday sun.

(I’ve since apologised to our friends for my weird behaviour on that holiday. It’s hard showing people you really like your really unlikeable bits, but I suppose that’s true friendship. It’s a painful evolution going from the ‘all nice’ to the ‘mostly nice but a bit of a dick sometimes’ friend, but I think it’s a necessary shift if you’re going to carry on having any type of long-lasting, meaningful relationship.)

On the final day of that holiday we went into Seville for lunch, before our flight home. We left our luggage in a locker at the station. We went to a beautiful restaurant that Joab and I had visited the year before, El Rinconcillo, and ate clams, pork loin, tomato salad, pig cheeks, anchovies, and loads more that I can’t remember.

Back at the station we opened the locker and I bent down to get our bags.

Joab said: Let me get them. You’re pregnant.

I didn’t ask him to clarify. My body warmed to his words in the same way that it does when he tells me about something I did a long time ago, even though he wasn’t there. He knows because I told him, but him remembering that my beloved cat Norton died when I was 7, or that I sewed lace sleeves onto a jacket during my Prince-obsessed teenage years, or that I used to buy £2.50 pizza from a place called Abdul’s at university, feels terribly romantic to me.

So, when he said ‘You’re pregnant” in that moment by the locker, he was telling me something about myself that I didn’t yet know, and that, let’s face it, he didn’t really know either. And yet it was very moving.

Four days later I sat in bed crying. Joab stroked my head, told me we could go again.

“We said three attempts. We’ve got one more!” he said.

“Why didn’t it work? It’s so disappointing!” I cried. I’d done two cheapie Superdrug pregnancy tests, then thrown them onto the floor 5 minutes later when neither showed a line.

After I’d had my shower, put on some make-up and messaged my sister with the disappointing news, I picked the abandoned pregnancy tests up off the floor.

There was a line on each. Broken, fuzzy pink lines, but lines all the same. I called Joab into the room to take a look.

“They’re there”, he said.

“You see them?”

“Yes. Why don’t you go and buy another test. An expensive one this time?”

Within minutes I was in Sainsbury’s buying two Clear Blues.

Back at home I peed on the first stick and within seconds, not minutes, a blue cross started to appear. On the next test, too.

Did it feel like a relief? After spending the best part of an hour having to get used to the fact that I wasn’t pregnant, my brain couldn’t process this new information. It felt like a trick, and all I could imagine was that the next text would be negative.

I got ready to go to my friend’s memorial, a beautiful gathering at a church near Victoria. Only a couple of months before she died, my friend had looked at me and said she could ‘already see me pregnant.’

There are no spoilers here, as I have a three-month-old baby now, so from that day of finding out, I remained pregnant. Even after some scary bleeding that took me by complete surprise at 7 weeks. Joab and I were walking across Brockwell park on the most beautiful sunny evening, carrying fish and chips for us and the boys. I was on the phone to my sister, and I felt a sudden dampness between my legs. I put my hand there. Blood.

I had to wait 3 days to get an ultrasound at Kings’, and during that waiting period I thought the worst. I wish I could have been more positive, but it all felt too familiar.

In the early pregnancy unit I turned my head away from the sonographer, and the screen. I had been there before, the year before. We had conceived naturally but at 8 weeks the foetus was not developing as it should have been. By 9 weeks there had been nothing, or barely anything.

This time, though, a heartbeat. The most surprising thing of all.

In searching for the details of that time I did find a photo of me and Joab outside the hospital after we’d seen Ray for the first time, and heard his little heartbeat. Joab is pulling a funny face, I am smiling. I sent him the photo the next day, still in disbelief, A timestamp for the disbelief and happiness we felt in that moment.

“Happiest day ever” it says.

Essential fries