Could It Be?

Everyone around me was pregnant. Or so it seemed. One of my closest friends was approaching the 12 week mark and another had just seen two pink lines when she peed on a stick last week. Babies were everywhere.

Normally when I'm at the fertility clinic, I assume that the women around me are struggling to get pregnant because, well, they're at a fertility clinic. Today though, the first woman I heard was talking about her first trimester nausea and the second had a considerable baby bump. There I sat, struggling. I was there to have the thickness of my uterus lining checked in the lead up to a frozen embryo transfer (or FET for those in the know). While I'd been through this process before, and the oestrogen I'd been taking should have made me feel better, I couldn't help but worry.

I slipped off my undies and got onto the wooden table. My feet made the old, wooden stirrups creak as I placed my feet in them. The doctor started talking about how we'd schedule my transfer for after Easter and I mentioned the brown discharge I'd been having. I was worried my lining wouldn't be perfect enough for a transfer.

He slipped a condom onto the internal ultrasound wand and my eyes fell to the screen. Almost immediately, the mood in the room changed. "Have you been having sex at the right times?" "I guess so I replied, I haven't really been thinking about it." And that was true. We were between FET cycles. My focus was on the next transfer because we'd been told my hormone levels were so out of whack this month that natural pregnancy wouldn't be possible. So when the doctor pointed out a pregnancy sac in my uterus, and a yolk sac inside that, we were both pretty shocked.

The doctor touched my knee and a dream-like state began. In a blur I threw thoughts the doctor's way. "But I had a period." "Aren't the drugs I'm on meant to stop ovulation?" "Are you sure?"

The doctor replied calmly. "I've been doing this a long time. I know what I'm looking at."

A look at my ovaries showed where the egg had been released from. This was getting real. And once I had my undies back on and was sitting back in his office, he laid a little black and white picture on the desk in front of me. And that's when it got really real. "Tentative congratulations," he said.