Doubts

I hate being a pessimist. Nothing is attractive about all the self-loathing and the second-guessing. When I was younger, I longed to be one of those girls who's so confident that "everything will work out for the best" or "though the rain falls, the sun will peak it's head out from behind the clouds soon." Yeah, I hated those girls.

My problem: to date, this cycle has been going really well. I'm currently at CD11 and have 22 follicles. That's right, 22. Any doubt I have about their existence is continually squashed by the lower back pain, the feeling of two cue balls pressing up against my kidneys and stomach and the constant feeling of nausea.  E2 level is 4728 as of this morning. We're triggering tonight for a retrieval on Wednesday morning. For all practical purposes, I should be very hopeful and optimistic. After all, the medical staff is elated. Yet instead, I'm finding myself waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Being on this path long enough results in hearing a number of IVF stories: there's the ones where everything was perfect from the beginning leading to a very happy ending. Everyone on this path wants one of those. Then there's the ones where things didn't look that great going in, but resulted in a healthy happy baby. I've done my share of cheering for those. And then there's the stories that people talk about in the third person or are not told till years later. The stories of the optimal cycle that failed.

Tonight, I'm finding myself on the edge of a cliff, getting ready to dive head-first into this next step.  Though I know that there is nothing I can do to change the future, I'm absolutely terrified. I'm terrified that in the next few days everything that I knew will be changed. There's a chance that all of this will work out wonderfully and the thought of that brings tears to my eyes. And yet the eternal pessimist looms, pointing a gnarly finger at the other possibility. I really wish that I had a bat to beat her up, knocking her out of commission, if just for one night. So that for once, that sense of caution and preparation for the worst was gone. That I could for the first time in two years embrace the unknown, excepting whatever the outcome would be.