One more sleep

It's the night before our Day 5 Report. Tomorrow between 9-12, we will get a call from an IVF nurse to either 1) schedule our transfer for Thursday, 2) tell us we are doing a freeze-all, or 3) tell us that our transfer is canceled in the event that we have no blastocysts. As you can imagine, we are nervous. And I mean we - John is noticably nervous too...

Can you blame us for being nervous given our history? If you don't know what I mean, go back to my posts from December... I will never, ever forget December 9, 2013. That is without a doubt the worst day of my life.

This time around, we are remaining positive (somehow!! Don't ask me how!!!), yet our hearts are still scarred and guarded from our past experience. This evening, I cleaned up all of the IVF meds. Usually, we keep them out and accessible, but incase things go bad tomorrow, I want them out of sight. We don't need any painful reminders laying around the house.

We also hung up the painting I made over the weekend. Meag & I took a painting class together. The painting of the day was a butterfly picture, and with Meag starting stims for IVF that day and the fact that her follies/embryos are nicknamed butterflies... Well, we had to go paint!!! Of course I added a ninja mask to mine :) And also made sure to paint five butterflies - one for each of our embryos.

How have I survived the past several days without ripping my hair out? My therapist gave me a few breathing and visualization exercises. I've also been doing Circle+Bloom. And my therapist told me to think of these 5-6 days as a marathon. I LOVED this idea as soon as she suggested it, and knew exactly how to do it. I usually think of a marathon in three segments (10 miles run with my head, 10 miles run with my legs, 10K run with my heart) so I assigned one segment for every two days. Right now, I'm at mile 19 so to speak. The fatigue has set in, but I know from experience that I'll survive. I just have to keep going and accept the pain for what it is.

I was chatting with a fellow Dreamer this evening, and made a list of reasons to have hope:

1. New clinic, new doctor, new protocol 
2. New clinic's embryology lab is among the best in the country
3. No call yet, which according to our paperwork means we don't have any 'abnormal results' 
4. Fellow bumpie with a similar IVF history switched to our doctor and is now pregnant
5. Above bumpie also mentioned that 40% of her embryos made it to blastocysts
6. Feeling any amount of hope, no matter how small, is better than feeling hopeless

As long as we have one blastocyst to transfer (fresh or frozen), we will be ecstatic. I'm laying down to sleep and my final wish and prayer of the day... You can guess it. Please, please, please...

And just for fun, and because JayTee is AWESOME, I leave you with this: