I'm 33 today. That makes me older than Beyonce, Natalie Portman, Jessica Alba and Kim Kardashian. It has been 25 years since Michael Chang faced off against Ivan Lendl at Rolland Garros. Not really a good thought. I remember when I was 27, I had an older friend who was turning 30. It was a rough time for her, she had broken up with a second 'hopeful' boyfriend and had recently broken her leg in a bad accident. She had moved back to Singapore after some years abroad and I guess life was just not going that well.
She told me that on her birthday, she drove out to the beach and watched the horizon for a couple of hours, just 'me' time. I didn't understand it then, the need to be so contemplative, so ponderous and heavy. For me, birthdays were just about celebrations. But, now that I find 33 a startling number, as if time has passed too fast, or is somehow passing me by, I do.
Even so, my birthday this year has been a bit hazy, as have most of my birthdays in my thirties. I don't feel like partying and I dislike the feeling that you are past one age and hurtling toward another, which I never used to feel before.
This birthday has been a wonderful collage of meals with loved ones and quiet time. I have been very blessed, I had cake and a party in a beautiful home, I was sent presents and recordings of children wishing me a Happy Birthday from overseas. My friends from here and London, and New York sent messages that rang and buzzed through the day. I really treasure these, mostly women, and as I read the messages, I thought about how they represented each and all spheres of my life. I feel and know that I am so very blessed.
I spent most of the day in bed — as luck would have it, our transfer was on Saturday, the day before my birthday. The week before was uneventful, though I hated taking medication to sustain my hormone levels after the Lupron shut down my own ovarian system (is there anything more ironic than to take hormone medication for hormones you produce naturally?), my lining was amply thick and the transfer date was brought forward slightly. The takeaway is that growing or maintaining a lining, presumably, has never been our problem. I wonder if there is any correlation between people who have endometriosis and who grow a lining well, or if the correlation is age and genetics?
The whole preamble to a FET (frozen embryo transfer) is tedious but painless. The progesterone shot, which all the blogs assured me was with a large needle and very painful — it's not, this is why you shouldn't believe everything you read — and the filling your bladder with water, was only mildly uncomfortable, as was the actual procedure itself. Your bladder needs to be full, so that the contact, as opposed to a vaginal ultrasound, will be able to see through the solid bladder to the uterus underneath. This filling and maintaining your bladder with enough water turns the whole process into almost a comedy.
Compared to the process of stimulation, my experience was that the transfer is an absolute non-event. I kept expecting it to be like an IUI, shallow and quick, but actually, it was a lot deeper and took, I think, twenty minutes, which of course felt like an hour. At the time I thought an IUI would be done, Dr N. said "now we will cleanse the cervix area" and I thought to myself, what, you mean we haven't started? Everyone says how seeing the embryos on the screen is so remarkable, or seeing them replaced in the uterus, but maybe because I knew to expect this, all I saw were unimpressive specks on a grainy ultrasound screen. I turned my head into a comfortable position and concentrated on just keeping very still, the time and details seemed very foggy, almost surreal.
Like most of this process, it's all mental. You feel slightly crampy and distended, you keep thinking about how much the embryos would have grown and pray that they are sticking in there. In truth, other than the tedious repetitive medication, two Progynova estrogen tablets three times a day and a Duphaston tablet and Crinone progesterone cream inserts (a squishy and messy business) both day and night, I am absolutely fine and probably don't feel anything at all.
I spent the weekend and indeed the week looking for new updates on People.com, because the news doesn't move fast enough on weekends and I've chosen an unfortunate time to swear off Facebook, to entertain myself or take my mind off my boobs or sleep. Luckily Kim Kardashian and Kanye West have chosen this exact weekend to get married extravagantly, which fills my waking hours with nonsense.
It is only Day 2 and already I am bored, slightly dizzy from over-sleep and my back aches from lying down. I have already begged God to find a space in the universe to let this happen, even though I told myself I wouldn't. I talk to them, both, every day. I wonder if severely cytoplasmic granularity means they won't make it. I wonder, when using the Crinone, if it's a waste of energy and meds, if they aren't in there or growing anymore. But then I tell myself that the embryologist wrote on the report "two viable embryos were replaced". I remember that in his cloth-cloak, he told me "it should work. The embryos are good". I must believe they are viable.
I tell them that I want them so badly, to fight. That I love them. I show them sights as I go about my day, and tell them that I love this world, and want them to have the chance to experience it. The thing that the blogs are right about is that the wait is killing. I veer between being happy that days are over and the day is closer, to being fatalistic about the ugly extra blobs our embryos have on them that surely renders them disadvantaged.
There are days I can't bring myself to admit that to myself and just dwell in the empty state of mind that maybe we'll see a baby's face, and then there are days like today, when my acupuncturist tells me that I don't have to come back, because we are past 5 days and thus it has either implanted or not and there's nothing more acupuncture can do to help — when I think, it's all over one way or the other.
