Wondering

I haven't been posting lately because I've been struggling. I never imagined that once we finally made the leap to using a GC it would be this difficult. I never imagined that we'd be on our third transfer, our last chance. I never imagined we'd be this close to failure. At this point I am assuming the next transfer will not have a positive result. It's the only was I can survive at this point. If I have the slightest bit of hope and we have a  negative result it will kill me. I've learned that wishing and hoping and praying and planning doesn't do the trick, so I am guessing that planning for a negative result can't do any harm.

I don't want to talk about the final transfer. I won't be posting dates and I would appreciate it if you wouldn't ask. We need to do this one on our own. No balloons for me this time thanks.

You might be wondering about the photo above. The days go quickly when I am at work. Even though it's stressful, it's distracting. Weekends are more difficult. Living in the burbs is a minefield. I reject most invitations. One of my great distractions on the weekend is my garden. This is the first summer I have ever had a garden. My Love built it for me. It's such a dream come true for me. The second I get home from work I check on the day's progress. Is the soil moist enough? Does anything look like it's battling a disease or parasite? Any new blossoms? I love my garden. All weekend long I have dirty finger nails and I love then that way. This weekend my infertility invaded my garden. I am so pissed that it has crept into one of my few havens. Since this is the first year with a real garden I wasn't feeling very confident. Rather than growing everything by seed I bought most of the plants as seedlings. I did plant three types of seeds because I could not find seedlings- purple carrots, beets and parsnips. I didn't have much confidence, but within ten days they had all germinated and we had little tiny veggies all over the place. I watched them grow every day and more sprouts came up each day. It was thrilling. After a week or two I realized they needed to be thinned. This means, in our case, pulling out 4-5 perfect good little seedlings for every one we left to live. They were just too crowded. For some reason this felt like Sophie's Choice to me. It felt like I was a carrot murderer every time I pulled a littled seedling. I started to wonder how an embryologist decides between two nearly identical embryos. They have to give one the opportunity at life and the other will most likely be destroyed. Don't get me wrong, I am as pro-choice as they come, but it hit home when I was giving some carrots a chance to grow and sending the rest to the lawn waste bag. With each of our previous transfer there was an embryo that the embryologist decided was "inferior" to the ones that were transfered. They might have been used for medical research or they might have been destroyed depending on whether or not they survived for another day or two. I hope that they made it and were used for stem cell research, but I will never know. I wonder if I will ever be able to thin my seeds without thinking of my lost embryos. I wonder if I will always skimp a little when I sprinkle the vegetable seeds so there will be less thinning to be done. I wonder if there will be any little joy in my life that our battle with infertility doesn't taint. I wonder when all of this will end. I wonder how much more I can take. Most of the time now I wonder if the two embryos that didn't make the cut for the transfers were the ones that were meant to be my children. It all makes me wonder.