And so it begins…the infamous two week wait. Those two weeks where your hope begins to resurface, your dream becomes alive again, you think this could be that one cycle where it all happens. If you’re like me and have been trying to conceive for quite some time, you may also be trying to quell these emotions. You get excited thinking of the possibility of life growing inside you – excited that right now it’s just the two of you and in about 40 weeks there may be a new addition to your family. You may also be just as quick to push these thoughts out of your mind, after all, you’ve been down this road before.
This is the first cycle of being on Clomid, so I feel extra hopeful – a sense of excitement that perhaps I didn’t feel a few months ago, but I also know how painful the disappointment is. Yet, I still visit the due date predictor just to see. I allow myself a bit of fantasizing about announcing our pregnancy to our parents. I imagine how I will manage the third trimester riding the subway to work or perhaps by then we’ll be in the suburbs. I imagine wonderful things, but I don’t allow it to go on for too long. I am more cautious about the amount of caffeine I put in my body. Just last night my husband and I had dinner and instead of ordering a mixed drink I went with a glass of wine. I take precautions just in case – I’ve taken these precautions nearly every month since we started trying. I don’t consume a lot of caffeine, nor do I drink much alcohol or eat unhealthy, so I’m not making huge adjustments, but during this time I won’t splurge for a pumpkin spice latte if I’ve already had my cup of coffee.
If you’ve read a few of my posts, you’re already familiar with my disdain for the baby boards. Sometimes I still visit based on my search results in Google, after all, for all the back and forth and nonsensical information posted, there are still some gems of experience available and success stories loaded with helpful and accurate information. One thing early on I noticed across these boards was reference to the two-week-wait and women clocking their day by day symptoms – literally a list of all 14 days of “symptoms”. It is hard not to get wrapped up in the “early pregnancy symptom” phenomenon and read into every little change in your body. The truth is, most women don’t experience pregnancy symptoms until their missed period. Now, I do believe however that some women “just know”. Especially those who have been trying to conceive quite some time– I think you start monitoring and getting to know your body better than you ever have and are probably more inclined to know when something is different.
As I enter this two week window I find myself filled with some trepidation. Excited to see if Clomid and preseed did the trick (preseed is “sperm-friendly” – it does not affect actual conception, but I’m hoping it helped get things where they are supposed to go), but also scared that it didn’t change anything. My husband and I are using ‘when’ instead of ‘if’ – I tend to use a combination “when/if” just in case, you know, not trying to count my chicks before they hatch. In the back of my head, which slowly makes its way front and center as these two weeks progress, I think ‘what happens if I’m still not pregnant?’ I try to stay positive and think for the best, or not think about it at all, but we all know how hard that can be. I will also take my progesterone supplement during these two weeks as recommended by the nurse. In my appointment a few weeks back with my fertility specialist she said we would just try Clomid, but I am scared that if the Clomid works and I fall pregnant, that the lining of my uterus will not sustain a pregnancy. I’ve only had a few cycles where I had no luteal phase spotting and that was when I was on the progesterone. Had the nurse recommended otherwise, then I would not have taken the supplement.
So over these next two weeks I will need to surely find some other things to take my attention away from “possible symptoms” and counting down the days. Let’s try and change the ‘two-week-wait’ to the ‘two-week-takeback’ – do you even remember what these two weeks in your cycle were like before you tried conceiving? I would love to hear about the things you do during this time frame to help you focus on all the other things outside the realm of fertility.