What Are You Waiting For?

One thing about cycling is that you just keep waiting for the next milestone. Starting Lupron. Starting estrogen. Stopping Lupron. Blood tests. Ultrasounds. I never did IVF with my own eggs or DE, but I know the list of milestones is even longer.

It's not that we are wishing our lives away. It's not that we can't enjoy moments that occur during our cycle. It's just that ever since we first began ttc, it seems that we do a lot of waiting. We have to wait for appointments. Some have to wait for their name to come up on a list. Some wait for donor matches. There is the well known 2ww that we've all suffered in some form or fashion. We wait for phone calls and test results. We wait in waiting rooms and we wait in exam rooms. If things didn't turn out as we hoped, we wait to figure out what to do next.

Now I have lists of things I am waiting for. Not actual, written lists. But I can reel off a number of things at any given time for which I am waiting.

I am waiting for my single tomato to turn red.

I am waiting for other tomatoes to appear (I actually look up the skirts of the flower petals hoping to glimpse newly emerging fruit).

I am waiting for my cantaloupe to do anything that looks remotely like bearing fruit.

I am waiting for my DH to come home from the gym.

I am waiting to get dinner started shortly.

And now...I am waiting and looking and checking for implantation bleeding. I am also waiting and debating when to pee on a stick. If I do it too early, of course it will be negative, but the BFN will cause stress anyway. So, I just keep thinking about it as the days tick by one by one. Waiting. Waiting.

In a way, this is a good wait. There is hope. There is anticipation. But as always, there is also the looming trepidation of potential failure.

Hope and Fear. Two sides of the same coin.

What is at the top of your waiting list?
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