We have a date!

Things have been pretty busy around here recently, and the only sign of anything out of the normal has been the increasingly regular alarms going off on my phone, reminding me to take one drug or another.

My new business is starting to look as though it may break even in its first year, and I've taken the fairly momentous decision to give up the 'crutch' of freelance work in my old field to concentrate solely on the new business. I'm doing my last bit of freelance work right now, and hoping to finish it before next Tuesday evening, because...

On Tuesday evening we're driving up to the town where the new clinic is, ready for transfer (assuming all goes well with the defrosting) on Wednesday.

I had a scan on Monday, my tenth day of taking oestradiol, and my lining was 12.4 mm, with no sign of any anomalies. I asked specifically about the polyp, and the nurse who did the scan looked very carefully and said if there was a polyp it would be filled with fluid, and there was no sign of anything fluid-filled in there. The consultant had said that it could be shed with the lining if I had another bleed, and I had a bit of bleeding last week, so I'm assuming that's what happened, and that I am now polyp-free.

So after six weeks of preparing my body for this, two years of fertility treatments and over three years of trying for a baby, how does it feel to be this close to transfer?

I don't think I can really identify my feelings towards it at the moment. In one way, I'm planning for success, thinking about how I would juggle pregnancy and childcare with my new career, repeating to myself the names that we've chosen, and imagining where the cradle will go in our bedroom for a newborn.

In another way, I can't imagine ever being successful. I'm very cautious about the next stage in our treatment, and very conscious that it is only the next stage - that it could fail now, and even if it doesn't, there are months and months of possibilities of failure ahead of us. I spend a lot of time thinking about how our life would be if we never had children, what the positives of that would be, and reminding myself how difficult it would be to continue to build up my business with a baby - preparing myself for failure, in other words.

Am I excited about Wednesday? My family certainly are. DH is. I'm.... keeping my mind busy. The people I do this freelance work for are usually very good at estimating how long it'll take, and I've got four to five days' worth waiting to be done. I'm starting it today, and I'd like to finish it before we leave on Tuesday evening. That means working at least one day of the weekend, and it's tedious, mind-consuming work. At the moment, I'm thinking about getting that done.

I've also cleared my diary so that, assuming I get this work finished, I can spend a couple of days at the end of next week with my feet up, catching up on some long overdue reading.

So activity-wise, the 'before' is sorted, and the 'after' is sorted. We've got a hotel booked for Tuesday and Wednesday nights, and DH has booked the time off work.

And that's it. I've told a few people that it's happening, because they asked how things were going. They've got very excited, and I've tried to damp down their excitement by pointing out that the embryos might not even survive defrosting. I worry a little bit that I've got a dreadful cough at the moment, and if it gets even worse, I wonder if we'll even be able to go ahead.

Mostly, though, I'm relaxed. I'm not obsessed with this process, as I was for previous IVF treatments. When the nurse came to give me my intralipids, she commented that my blood pressure was low - when I was working in London, it was high, so surely that's a sign that I'm more relaxed these days.

I can't even say I'm waiting, because I'm too busy getting everything else done to have the luxury of waiting. All preparations that can be made have been made already, and now I'm just getting on with everything that needs to be done and the perpetual juggling that my life seems to entail at the moment.

Is it the calm before the storm? Will I become more preoccupied with it again as the time gets closer? Will my state of zen-like calm crack and bring with it the emotional messiness of previous cycles?

Who knows - but I'm sure I'll be appreciative of any prayers and sticky thoughts that you can send my way next Wednesday.