One year anniversary...

Today marks the one-year anniversary of Sabrina's conception. It was election day and we were at the hospital, nervous and a little anxious about the retrieval surgery, the first big step in the IVF cycle.

By that stage I had been taking 4x daily hormone injections for almost two weeks. The night prior, as we were directed, Gene injected me with the HCG hormone shot at 9:30 pm. That's the one that ripens and matures the many eggs that my ovaries had been working over-time to produce so that they can be extracted exactly 11 hours later. It's an outpatient procedure but you tend to be fairly sore afterwards. Later that night, the IVF clinic called to say they had retrieved 17 eggs from me, which was great.

Three days later on November 9th, we went back for "the transfer" and that's when we learned that of the 17 eggs, 10 were mature and of those, 7 successfully fertilized and were now embryos. Three of those were great quality (I think they even called them "grade A" - as if we were talking about beef!). Taking the conservative route, which they advocated, we had 2 transferred into me.

We had to wait 9 looooooong days before I could take a blood pregnancy test to see if one or both of those embryos decided to stick around for the long-haul. On the morning of November 20th, 2007, I got to the hospital as soon as the lab opened for my test (me, and a few other ladies who were in the same IVF cycle; we had gotten to know each other along the way). Thankfully these tests are put in for "STAT" processing. Lord knows, we've been waiting a long time to find out :)

Later that morning I was in my office, cell phone by my side. I decided to call and leave a message asking for the nurse coordinator to check the computer for any results. About half an hour later, she called. I'll never forget her words "Your test is positive. Congratulations". Immediately I started crying. "Really?" I asked. "What was the HCG level?" "112" she answered. She said that I would need to go back in for another blood test in 2 days to re-confirm (this was standard protocol and I knew from the last 2 cycles). Two days later was Thanksgiving day and I knew the lab would be closed, so I had to go in the day after. That test result was also positive and the HCG levels were elevating at the right pace.

What we didn't know was if we had a singleton or twins. We would find that out on Monday, December 3rd when we went in for an ultrasound. The purpose was to see how many embryos were implanted and to check for heartbeat(s) . Isn't it amazing that a heart begins to beat when we're only 2-3 weeks old? We had decided to spend the weekend in DC, stay at a hotel and just drive the short distance from the hotel to the hospital on Monday morning for our appointment. So there I was, lying on the examining table, Gene sitting by my side, holding my hand. The doctor told us "OK, I'm just going to take take a look and scan your uterus, and then let you know what I see". OK by us! I was glad he said that so that we knew he was working and it served as an acknowledgement that we were dying to know. He was looking at the monitor, moving the probe around for about 20 seconds before he said "You have one embryo and here's the little heart pumping". And sure enough, you could see the little valves fluttering. I started crying and giggling (that's hard to do!) and squeezed Gene's hand really tight. Six years of trying to conceive and this, our third IVF cycle, was indeed the charm.

Just thinking back to that moment brings back all of the emotions. The nervousness, the excitement of waiting to hear, and then the joy and cautious optimism once we knew. It is one of those moments that is seared in my mind forever, along with snapshots in time from our wedding day, graduating from college and from high school. Now of course, the latest 'entry' is the day our little Sabrina was born.