When you’re talking about the science of making a woman pregnant, Day One refers to the first day her period arrives. (Interesting side note, this is also the day that they start counting the 40 weeks of a pregnancy if you’re successful in getting pregnant. So, by the time you’ve actually introduced egg to sperm, you’re considered about two weeks pregnant.) I’ve never had so many people interested in the arrival of my Crimson Tide.

 I’d been using a cycle tracking app for quite some time so I knew roughly when it would arrive but it still needed to get here. Finally, on a Sunday morning I woke up to find it had arrived. A quick call to the fertility clinic started the countdown to ovulation.

If there were frozen embryos, why was my ovulation so important? Couldn’t they just transfer when ready? Turns out that they try to make everything line up as closely as possible and as naturally as possible (at least in my case). The embryos that were frozen were 5 days post collection from the donor and so I needed to be 5 days post ovulation to receive them to have the best outcome. While I knew this from all the reading, and it seems so obvious looking at it, this is something that surprised a few people. Hilariously so, often.

This lead to my least favourite part of the process to date … ALL THE BLOOD TESTS. On day 10 I had the first one. They were watching for the hormone surge that would indicate I was ovulating. Unfortunately for my right arm, my veins were hiding and I was already starting to look like a junkie with bad aim after the first one. I had another test on day 12 and then again on days 13, 14 and 15.

After day 15, FINALLY! I got the call that we were good to go. That was my trigger to start the progesterone pessaries. And wow. What a difference that made. When I woke up the next morning, I thought I’d just had a bad night of sleep. Nope. This has been my exhausted state ever since. I was surprised at how instantaneous the change was. One day good, next day completely gassed. Hormones, eh?

Fortunately, it also meant my poor elbow ditches could heal. Transfer procedure was scheduled for 5 days later.

A year of hurry up and wait was finally reaching the next step. To be honest, I had a bit of an emotional meltdown leading up to this. I think that spending a year with my life being planned in tiny increments had finally caught up to me. "Won't hear from ethics committee until the end of May" means that I'm good until June. 'Egg donor will do her thing in July" means that July is good. "Three months quarantine" means that I've got until end of October. I don’t think I was quite prepared for how that would feel. Finally we were at the moment where I had a job to do … well, sort of. I suppose my job was just to think welcoming thoughts and eat well and rest and take care of myself. I could do that.