Superstition

Thank you for all your lovely comments to my last post - I do feel better about things now (probably because there have been no more of those e-mails since I wrote it).

I realised this morning how relaxed I've become about waiting for this IVF cycle. I felt a bit crampy and wondered why, and it took me a minute or two to twig that it's that time again and I'm having ovulation pains.

I'm also feeling relaxed about the idea that it would take a miracle of Lazarus rising from the dead proportions for us to conceive without help. My back is now sufficiently recovered to consider a bit of light exercise, and DH had just the perfect sort of exercise in mind. And we've just been enjoying it, without any thought about timing, or whether or not he manages to produce the goods, or any of the other things I've stressed about over the last couple of years. So I know I won't get pregnant this month, but somehow that thought isn't wiping the satisfied smile off my face...

I'm also looking towards the end of the month and thinking about this cycle that may be starting in a couple of weeks. Workwise, the timing is not ideal, and some aspects of it might be very difficult. I'm thinking that I'll have the blood test on CD 1 anyway, and just see what happens. My FSH level might be too high, or there might be some other reason not to go ahead, and at the moment I don't think that'll disappoint me too much, because it'll give me another month(ish) to keep taking the supplements and preparing myself mentally, and my work commitments are not quite so difficult to get round in late May/early June (although there are other things going on in early June that will make it difficult to be in London as much as I'd need to be for a treatment cycle, so maybe late June/early July would be best).

I suppose one of the things that makes me hesitant is superstition. You see, about a year ago, a lot of people on the TTC forum I was posting on were getting 'angel readings' from some woman over the internet. You'd go onto her website, pay something like £15 and leave your e-mail address, with no other details, and she would do a reading and e-mail it to you.

Now, as far as I know, there is nothing on that TTC forum to link my username to my real name and e-mail address. And I deliberately went onto her site through Google, rather than clicking any links that people had put on the forum. So other than the fact that she'd been discussed on this forum, and that a lot of women had consulted her in a short space of time who all wanted to know the same thing, there was no way for her to know what I wanted from her.

The response that I got immediately identified that I was worried about whether I would ever have children. She also picked up that my age was a concern and made a couple of other accurate statements about my situation.

I thought at the time, after a year of TTC, that her comments about the pain I had suffered as a result of being unable to conceive were a bit over the top. Of course, since then the pain has been piled on in bucketloads, and a year later I don't think her comments are over the top at all.

Anyway, she said that she was getting a very strong message that I would have a baby, and that it would be loved and welcomed by all my friends and family. And she said that July felt like a very important date to her, but she couldn't work out whether I would conceive in July or get my BFP in July.

This time a year ago, July seemed ages away, and I hoped she was wrong and that I would conceive earlier - but of course, I didn't.

And so now, with another July really not so far away and seeming like the clearest month for me to have treatment in, I'm slightly paralysed with this fear that she might have been right, and that if we go ahead with a cycle before then, it won't work because the timing isn't right.

The sensible part of me says that I'm not getting any younger. Mr Greek God was very clear that he thought as soon as my FSH was right, we should go ahead, because it might be our only chance. And there are other good reasons not to delay deliberately, like the difficulty of keeping us both on this strict dietary regime for that length of time, and the fact that Mr Miracle Worker likes the actual treatment cycle to be as close as possible to the monitoring cycle so that he can use the information that he got from the monitoring cycle to indicate the best course of treatment for the real thing.

But this stupid reading is really messing with my head. I know I should never have had it done in the first place, but the fact that it said several things which were accurate and which the woman couldn't have known in any way I can explain pulls me up short and makes me wonder if I should wait. And then I keep trying to convince myself that maybe the cycle month isn't important, because last July was a significant date for us in that it was the month we finally got tested and joined the IVF rollercoaster.

OK, so maybe the fact that barely an hour goes by without me thinking about these things means that I'm not quite as relaxed as I think I am. And maybe that's another good reason not to delay any further. I'm just kind of hoping that the decision will be taken out of my hands, one way or the other...