IVF Journey: 18w6d pregnant

This is my IVF diary. My husband and I have been trying to have a baby for four years now, and have a diagnosis of 'unexplained infertility'. We have finally reached the top of the waiting list for IVF - a form of assisted conception. I'm blogging about what happens as it happens, as a kind of therapy for me and as an awareness raising exercise of what IVF is all about.

I had an extra midwife appointment today, to check up on me because I’d been ill.

Happily I am now feeling reasonably well – certainly adequately medicated and less depressed – so the appointment was brief and straightforward. I communicated this, everyone was pleased, all good.

The husband came along with me, but that’s probably the last time he’ll come to routine appointments for now as I can manage by myself and they are indeed now routine.

We had a student midwife in with us, she was very nice.

My midwife took my usual tests: urine (fine, but ideally not to be presented in a Lucozade bottle next time), blood pressure (fine on the second reading) and baby’s heartbeat (still going, still in there).

The midwife (and the student) also felt my belly and pronounced my uterus to be the size of a small melon now – which is appropriate growth. The baby is likely to be about six inches long now.

It is hard to believe there is something so big taking up extra space inside me, you can’t really tell from looking at me yet. Well, I can tell and in certain clothes I maybe look a bit fat but my jeans still do up and there is no obvious bump yet.

All in all, uneventful appointment.

Something came to my attention over the last few weeks and I’ll note it here before I forget. DVT. Pregnant women are more at risk of Deep Vein Thrombosis, and if you’re pregnant and in hospital for as much as ten minutes my friend tells me they give you a big lecture and stick support socks on you. (Shudder, I’m not a big fan of socks at the best of times). Anyhoo, I’m up and about now but since my friend told me this it has been irking me somewhat that I spent about eight weeks of my pregnancy in bed and no-one in the medical profession mentioned DVT to me. But worse! I read in my magazine yesterday that women taking HRT were more likely to get a DVT. I was on HRT for the IVF most of the time I was pregnant and sedentary – up until December. In fact I was on a quadruple dose. Well it hasn’t happened anyway, no DVT here and I’m up and about now, so hopefully no crisis there. Don’t feel very well looked after though. Just a bit scared in retrospect.