Tuesday, October 11, 2011

 
I know this woman. She's a couple of years younger than me; we met in writing class at uni maybe five years ago.
She's been doing IVF since, I think, just before we met. She has been through miscarriages, egg donation, pretty much the works. A couple of months ago her last two embies (of four; two failed to thaw) gave her a biochemical pg with no heartbeat.
I went to the launch of a book she has a piece in on Sunday, bleeding myself from that last failed cycle. I couldn't stay; the speeches about miscarriage were too much for me. She told me later by email that she'd started crying when she tried to read her piece aloud. She was fine with me having left; said it was amazing I'd turned up at all. She's like that.
And I wish I could have had a spare emby to give her. I am grateful that I have her to talk to. I'm also a bit guilty that I am so upset about my embies not working when she has no child. I wonder sometimes if a tiny, tiny bit of the reason I need her friendship is to remind me that there are people worse off than me; the gulf between one child and none is a different order of things to the gulf between one and two.

I am, currently, reeling. Bewildered. Prone, in quiet moments when I let myself focus on it all, to sudden sharp gasps and small quiet howls. I am full of regret, anger and what ifs. I want a time machine, to go back and do acupuncture, bed rest and other things for every single damn emby, not just the last two. I want to go back to before I went to Hong Kong and get the cancer caught then. I can't believe all eight of them are used up.

At another level, I'm marshalling my arguments. I don't see, even with the admittedly low odds, why I shouldn't be allowed to try another fresh cycle. Right now. Not next month, not when I've had a chance to process things. My IVF provider doesn't do fresh cycles after the 46th birthday. I have 7 1/2 months to try. I want to start on THIS cycle. If we get any to freeze, I want to freeze them then do another fresh cycle. I want to give those damn, frustrating, random odds that beset my life another roll.

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