It’s September 2022 and we stopped doing IVF about 5 months ago…

I mentioned in my last post that I would give a little update about what happened in between (in short we had a couple of more pregnancies, one that had a particularly emotionally draining ending and then turned to IVF for 1.5 years.

You can catch the whole story by checking out our YouTube Channel and then heading over to my instagram page which has a few posts and stories about our IVF experiences there).

It’s been just over 2 years since our last pregnancy and given my age (now over 35!!) and all the crazy hormones from IVF we really had no idea what our natural fertility or ability to become pregnant would be like.

We had a couple of months trying to just generally enjoy being IVF-free. We attempted to have a holiday (we ended up having to isolate in northern QLD with COVID! – so NOT a holiday when you’re stuck indoors with a 3 year old and no toys) and then enjoyed a few evenings out at restaurants, pubs and some lovely dinners at home enjoying our favourite wines, until one day I decided to purchase all the alcohol we would need for the Birthday /Holiday season (it starts in September in our household and finishes at Christmas) so naturally, the day the wine arrived, I found out I was pregnant.

Our first pregnancy in 2 years. I can’t say I really felt one way or another about it, basically just like “oh, so that’s happened” and then went through the motions of trying to source a new OB (of course the one I had built an excellent relationship with over the past 6 years has retired!) and then tried to make arrangements for early scans and early appointments (I feel like that “difficult new patient” already) because I just really feel like I need to prepare for the worst (given the very, very low chance of having a healthy pregnancy) PLUS I flew out to Broome that same morning AND wanted to arrange everything in the couple of weeks we had before we headed over to the Gold Coast for (our next attempt, hopefully COVID-free this time!) at having another holiday.

Of course, the OB I’ve selected isn’t available on the dates where I’ve asked for an early appointment, so has agreed for me to see a colleague. I was happily going along with the plan, thinking I could see the OB (colleague) on the 21^st and if the pregnancy didn’t work out, book a D&C for the 22^nd. But THEN a freaking public holiday was scheduled for the 22^nd just to throw a spanner in the works.

Trying not to stress out about how I was going to manage the situation (of course, assuming the worst and that the pregnancy would not work out) I phoned the OBs office to check if he would be doing surgery’s on the 22^nd

…they didn’t know at the time, but kind-of tried to reassure me that they would “work something out” if needed.

And didn’t I feel, again, like the most annoying patient in the world.

So anyway, before I get ahead of myself, getting back to today (15^th September) and I find myself expecting the worst at my very first scan scheduled for that day, because I’ve had a little spotting, and I know, a lot of people get that during pregnancy, but for me I pretty much assume I know what it means.

So, I get into my scan and to my surprise… the technician see’s what appears to be a pregnancy that is progressing well (measuring ahead of dates) with a good heartbeat (she was very considerate in sharing this with me within the first 2 seconds of looking… I can see my massive file in front of her – haha!) and then, she proceeds to tell me that she can see a second sac…

Of course she can, why would things be simple?

This second sac appears to have an embryo in it that has not developed. She informs me that it is possible that it will just absorb… or that it may still progress – only time will tell.

I tell her that I’ve had some spotting, and is that the cause of it?

She continues investigating, and tells me that she can see where the spotting is coming from, it should clear up soon… and no, the second sac does not appear to be the cause of the current spotting, and reassures me that the second sac does not appear to be having a negative impact on the progressing, heart-beating embryo.

So, all I know for now is we need to “wait and see what happens”.

As soon as I feel like I’ve totally got my head wrapped around this Balanced Translocation thing and all the possible scenarios we’re facing, something new comes along for us to process…

I guess the biggest concern for me at this point, even though unlikely, is that the second embryo does progress but has an unbalanced translocation (it’s very, very unlikely they both would have a balanced arrangement of chromosomes, but you never know).

The technician did check, and it appeared that I released two eggs, so it’s unlikely that the one embryo has split (plus, from my limited understanding of this scenario, that would not result in two sacs…).

Anyway, so for now I guess I just have to hope that everything is looking OK next week and that there’s no potential problems… I also need to wait to hear back from the lab that checks for unbalanced translocations (a blood test at around 11 weeks) to see if we can still go ahead with their test given the situation (edit to add – the lab is unable to check for unbalanced translocation using a NIPT test when there are two sacs present).

There’s certainly never a dull moment in the life of planning a family when you’re dealing with balanced translocations.

Until next week…