G'night, Gracie.

It's over. On July 10 we went and signed the papers to destroy the three embryos at Big Shiny Fertility Factory, the last of the Nine.

It was just too much. In the end, my desire for another child was overwhelmed by the sense that the time for that had passed. I'm almost 42. Her Indoors is 50. Small Boy is 6. In the end, I'm unwilling to gamble the time, the money, the sorrow, for an unlikely payoff. I put ten embryos in my uterus. Presumably, if there were a tiny soul that were meant to be part of our family, it would have taken one of the ten fucking chances it had to hop aboard and stay for the ride.

But nope. It's over. It no longer matters how much scar tissue my uterus has. My super-light periods are now nothing but a convenience. Small Boy will never have a full sibling; I feel intensely lucky that we have met some wonderful donor siblings via the Donor Sibling Registry. I will never pee on a stick again, never hold on the end of a phone with blood roaring in my ears waiting to find out a beta number. I will never, ever have another goddamn miscarriage. Sometimes thinking that makes me want to weep with gratitude.

During the last one I held the infinitesimal thing in my hand and thought "welp, this is it, it's over." I then immediately thought "no, no it's not, I'm not at the end, there's still a lot of road left." But my first instinct was correct. Gravida 5 Para 1, that's me, and that's how I shall die. Gravida 6 Para 1 if you count the chemical. Despite a wee Google I can't figure out if you're supposed to count chemicals.

I did not carry these embryos home and burn incense over them. Big Shiny Fertility Factory definitely didn't seem set up for that kind of malarkey. Really, they had a hard time finding someone to witness the forms at all since there was some kind of staff meeting going on; I just wanted to get out of there. Maybe it's because the embryos from Al's were Small Boy's batch. If the embryologist had gone one to the right, one of them would be with us instead of Small Boy.

Or not. Maybe that somewhat crappy-looking embryo, which turned into a perfect little boy, was the only one in the bunch. Maybe it was the only one in both of my ovaries that was fit to make a baby, or whose peculiar chemical balance could overcome whatever clusterfuck is going on in my uterus. Maybe in all worlds it's him or no one.  I can't know.

I had to try, though, didn't I?

the closing of the year

So Al's IVF Shack shut down, or... was shut down, or something. The upshot is that Al's was no longer going to be offering the service of changing the ice packs and playing developmentally-enriching Mozart to my Tiny Frozen Americans. I had to get 'em out, and get 'em out by December 1.

They notified us in November, and it sent me into a bit of a tailspin.I have been moving towards making a decision... very, very slowly. Not with two weeks to decide.

Now here's the point at which this could be a different story. I could say, dear reader, we did a crazy whirlwind cycle, it was all a blur, my lining came up surprisingly well despite the lack of fussing and greymarket drugs, and surprise! I'm pregnant! and I didn't want to tell anyone until I'd seen a heartbeat!

But that's not what happened.

It was unseasonably warm and sunny on November 25. I called the lab and they agreed it was a fine time for me to come over. I went to the lab. I signed papers. They handed me an medical-supply envelope containing five tiny plastic tubes. The tubes were covered in frost when they handed them to me, but by the time I reached my car they were already just cold. I took them upstairs. I sat in Small Boy's room, which I had thought would keep being the nursery, as it's the smallest room in the house. I wanted to sit in the rocking chair but we had already sold it on Craigslist, to a nice couple with three small children who needed it for #4. I sat on the rug instead. I cried. Then I found the pack of wood-resin incense that I burned back when I was pregnant with Small Boy, praying with every cell of my atheist's heart that he would be okay. There was one stick left in the pack. I stuck it in the little bowl incense holder. I snipped open the tubes and emptied them into the bowl. Five straws of embryos made half a teaspoon or so of fluid. I had the urge to swallow it, to at least have it in me that way, but I'd talked about it before with Her Indoors and she reminded me that there are some serious chemicals that go into embryo culture medium, and I agreed that it would be an incredibly fucking stupid way to get sick. I lit the incense, and it burned.

And that was that.

I still have three embryos left at the Big Shiny Fertility Factory, three out of the nine. I'll have to make a decision about them in April or May. Or, more correctly, I'll have to make the decision about them in April or May. The evidence keeps piling up. I know what I have to do.  But oh, do I shrink from doing it.

It's all over but the bleedin'.

Hcg 115. Game over.  Not too surprised -- after the bleed on Thursday night, on Friday I passed something suspiciously... embryo-like.  I had this wild fantasy that maybe it was one of twins (really, self? With those betas?) but yeah, no.  Honestly, I knew it was over then.

At least the timing is actually pretty good. I'm about to go to Vegas for a week for a conference, and now I won't have to bring shots. And I can drink coffee, and take the antihistamines I've been denying myself for the past two weeks. And it is blessedly not dragging me through beta hell, meandering across and down in a laggardly fashion -- that's a damn good sharp plunge.  Almost as if I'd, you know, passed the entire sac on Friday.  So I hope that's a sign that this will be over cleanly.

If not, though, I'm going to Vegas equipped. In my cosmetics bag I have a DIY uterine evacuation kit, leftovers from the last round: misoprostol, Zofran, painkillers. If this drags on in a painful way I can take care of it quickly. I probably won't use it, but I find it incredibly comforting that I have it.

This round officially over

Official negative beta. It's not like I didn't know it was coming.

I was -- amused? -- to realized why I was so sure I was pregnant. It's because, prior this, I have had six transfers. For those six transfers, only one of them was an outright negative. One was a chemical, and the other four were positives.

Furthermore, my frank negative cycle was in 2008. So I basically have no idea what the side effects of progesterone are like in the absence of pregnancy. I mean everyone told me that "progesterone makes you feel like you're pregnant", but I rather poo-pooed that -- I mean by now I surely can tell the difference, right? Those heavy cramps and heartburn, that's totally a pregnant thing.

Yeahno. Everyone's right. It's just progesterone. Good thing to remember for the future, I guess.