Transfer: and they said it would be easy...

They lied! Granted, who were all of you to remember that you were advising a woman with a posterior left ovary, tilted cervix, and apparently narrow path to the uterus? I should have recalled the debacle of IUI 4 when WHYBAML also had some catheter difficulty, but somehow I forgot and assumed that I would be in and out in 5 minutes. In my world, 5 minutes became 30.

Nurse Abrupt became very agitated, shaking her head every two minutes when the catheter would fail to pass through to the uterus. The doctor doing the transfer, Dr Chirpy, held his head high the whole time and persevered. Meanwhile, the embryologist, Dr Suave, kept me informed of the trial going on below. During all of this, The Dude sat to my left looking as if he was either going to cry or vomit. Later he told me that he felt very emotional during the procedure, vacillating from concern for my well-being to the thought of these two genetic combinations of us being (eventually) transferred.

After about 15 minutes Dr Chirpy reassuringly patted my thigh and said, "You are being very brave", to which I shrugged my shoulders at The Dude and muttered a thank you to Dr Chirpy. I appreciate his words, but I've been through a lot while climbing this IF mountain. I never expect things to run smoothly, and I always expect them to be a bit painful. What's another 20 minutes spent jamming a catheter up your cooter unsuccessfully? Dr Suave, so called because he was about 12 and seemed like he could be a bit of a ladies' man, popped up to my end of the blanket periodically to say "Nearly there" and "Almost time for the embryos".

Two catheters and 30 minutes later the embryos were successfully transferred. The two that were put back in were nearly perfect specimens according to Dr Suave, both 8 celled and grade 4. Well, apparently the slower of the two embryos, who Desmond has named Bertrand, was very nearly a grade 4, but still languished at the high end of grade 3 at transfer. For the record, my clinic rates grade 1 as the weakest and grade 4 as the strongest. So I'm told. The stronger embryo had next to no fragmentation, and the simple one had >10% fragmentation.

For now I am, dare I say, verging on the optimistic. Don't worry, it will soon dissipate and optimism will once again be banished, saved only for the normal women out there for whom pregnancy is a straightforward occurance.