What to expect when you’re not expecting XXII: Expecting?
Jesus, this is post number 22. That’s a lot of my dribble. Well mainly my dribble, some of it has been Kim’s pearls of wisdom. I’ve said this a lot but way back when we started writing we did it to help others. We wanted to be the people who others could read about so that it would normalise this shitty shitty process if they were going through it. “We’re not going through it alone!” That’s what we were trying to convey. And then our journey started getting shitter and shitter but we kept writing, because we found that we weren’t just helping others, a lot of you guys have been helping us.
I didn’t realise quite how supported we were until I got to tweet “pregnant” yesterday and it’s already had over 500 heart thingos. I mean nobody is going to say “Boo. You suck” to that message (well except that one dude but he seems to have deactivated his account), but still, we’ve had messages pouring in from people everywhere saying “I don’t know you but I’ve become incredibly invested in your story and I’m so pleased for you”. I’ve had people say to me “I’m so delighted for you, we also had to do IVF and I’ve been holding off telling you because it’s so hard when you’re not successful”. It’s amazing. You’re amazing. I’ve gained heaps of followers on Twitter who are going to be really disappointed at the dick jokes that I usually post.
The story of yesterday was pretty tense. After we had the egg transfer back into Kim we had to wait nine fucking days. That’s a really really long time. It was excruciating. People kept asking if it was excruciating. And it is. Thanks. Then yesterday morning we had to go take a blood test. Which we did. Then we went home. And waited. And waited. And waited. We just sat around. We played card games. I tried to read. That was hopeless. We joked about how shit the day would be when we found out it was a failure. Hohoho. We both had our cellphone volumes up really loud. Kim left the room for something, so I, because I am a hilarious man, thought it would be funny to ring her phone. So I did! Her ring tone sounded! Kim came tearing into the lounge. I laughed and said “haha that was me”. Kim did not laugh. At all. Like the reverse of laughing. I mean I can see why you’d react that way now. But at the time I was just trying to break the tension in the air. I didn’t. I made it worse.
Anyway a couple of hours later and Kim had to go to the bathroom and her bloody phone rang. I had to yell out “KIM IT’S THEM AND I PROMISE IT’S NOT ME”. She came scuttling out, I put it on speakerphone.
“Hi David, it’s the clinic, is now a good time to talk?”.
I want you to imagine those words being said in a tone that betrays absolutely nothing. You can’t tell if it’s good or bad, so you default to bad.
“Yes” Kim and I chorused back.
“It’s a positive test” she said. We both choked.
She went on to say that the blood test showed Kim’s HCG levels at 47. They would like to have seen those levels between 50 and 100 so it’s low. This could mean we’re going to miscarry. It might not. It does mean that we have to go back in and have another blood test on Friday. By then the HCG level should be 200-400.
Every successful milestone in this process comes with a “yes…but”. So your cheer at the good news is always tempered by the fact that it’s so precarious and failure could be right around the corner.
At this stage Kim is four weeks pregnant. People don’t usually announce pregnancies until 12 weeks which is the magical marker of safety. But we’ve never been pregnant before. And we’ve played this out so publicly that we didn’t feel we could do radio silence. So we told people. Then we put it on social media. And that’s where all the love and warmth and good feelings have come pouring in.
Also, when the good news came I said to Kim “wasn’t it funny when I rang your phone pretending it was them?” and it still wasn’t funny apparently.
There is every possibility that we could lose the baby. And that would suck massively. But what we do take out of this is that we can get pregnant. We’ve never done that and we didn’t know if it was possible. Now we do.
Pregnant.
— David Cormack (@David_Cormack) December 11, 2017
