a heartbeat

Last week we all headed to the doctor's office for our first ultrasound. They do one at six and a half weeks to look for a heartbeat. As our doctor told us (before looking), if there is a heartbeat, the odds of miscarriage during the first trimester drop to 9-10%. Then, around ten weeks, they look for movement and if that looks good, the percentage drops to 2%. All true for any pregnancy but it just so happens that you get to know way more than you want to when you go through this process. And I'm sitting there in my drape thinking, just go in there and look, dammit!

Meanwhile.... funny story.... so, Fraser and I had talked about how many embryos to transfer and we had agreed that one would be fine. The doctor agreed that one would be fine. I go in on the morning of the transfer and I'm laying on the bed getting ready for my pre-transfer acupuncture treatment when the embryologist comes in and says, "So we thawed one out. It survived. But it doesn't look great. We could put it in and see what happens; it might work, it might not. We could thaw out another one and see what that one looks like. If it looks good, we could put that one in. Or we could both in. So... what do you want to do?"

No pressure or anything, right? Nothing like making a life-altering decision within 20 minutes. Haha.. haha... ha. So, as I'm laying there with needles sticking out of me, trying to relax, I think about it: do I want to chance not getting pregnant or having twins? Having one child at a time is my first choice, definitely. But going through all the time, money, pain, emotional ups and downs of all this and to not get pregnant?! I know it happens and my heart goes out to those women, because this is some serious shit. So, bottom line, we decided to put two in and take our chances.

So, the doctor wands me and, hallelujah, there's one fetus in there! A little quarter of an inch teeny tiny thing with a nice strong heartbeat that we could see fluttering on the screen. When the doctor got the sound of the heartbeat, he asked us if we had our phones so we could record the heartbeat. Of course, Fraser and I looked at each other and laughed, because neither of us happened to have a phone on us that was capable of that. But we all heard it, loud and clear. Truly amazing, really. A four-chambered heart, beating away in a quarter inch "body". Cool. Very, very cool.

The fetus and the heartbeat