staying hopeful in the not yet

There’s not really a certain period of time that should go by before you decide you are ready to move forward again. Is it a month? 6 months? A year? There’s not a right answer because everyone is so different. For me, I go by how I feel. Am I ready to get back on the horse to potentially be knocked off again?

I’ve been knocked off this horse so many times over the past 6+ years but it has not stopped me from getting up and trying again. I refuse to give up on baby t. This baby will know EXACTLY how much I prayed for and wanted him/her. How I never gave up on him/her even when life threw me everything possible to push me to give up.

So, we decided we would start 2025 off with another transfer. The difference this time? We would be transferring our final two embryos.

We’ve never done a double embryo transfer but we prayed over this decision and decided to move forward. Our doctor was okay with transferring two at this point, our carrier was on board, everything was set in place to do this. With this decision, we knew we would either have twins (in hopes both stuck) or the door to having a biological child would be closed.

Our carrier started her cycle which starts the whole process –> Estrogen pills and lining check in a week. Lining was perfect (trilaminar and thick) and estrogen/progesterone levels were exactly where they should be. Progesterone injections started and transfer would be on Valentine’s Day, 2/14/25. Our little loves.

We transferred two absolutely perfect embryos, one hatching and one hatched. Now we wait! Pregnancy test in 10 days. Little Miss Impatient (me) always tests early because I’d rather know what is coming than completely be surprised when the doctor calls.

To our excitement, 7 days post-transfer, our at-home pregnancy test was positive! We took another one two days later, and positive again – the line was darker. It worked, we were pregnant!!

February 24th, our carrier went in for the HCG bloodwork. That morning, I told her I never answer the phone when our doctor calls because I want to see the results before I hear them. But with our positive pregnancy tests, I had no doubt we were pregnant, I was excited to see where our HCG levels would be. Our doctor called and I answered. The first words I hear, “I’m so sorry, Christa, the pregnancy test only showed 4 which means this is a negative test.” My heart shattered in complete disbelief.

Neither me, nor our carrier, believed the bloodwork. She was nauseous. She was tired. She saw positive at-home tests. The bloodwork had to be wrong. It’s been wrong before when I was pregnant. So we requested a repeat lab. She went back the next morning and my doctor called that afternoon. The level was 2 – we had already lost the pregnancy before even confirming we were pregnant.

I think I’m still dealing with the shock, disbelief, and grief of this loss. It was so confusing and we’ve never had this happen before. We haven’t named these two yet but we did find out one was a boy and one was a girl.

As we are not only grieving the loss of our last two babies, we are also grieving the loss of having a biological child. We will never know what OUR babies would look like: what color hair or eyes they would have, what their little voice would sound like or their first cry, would they want to play sports, would they be sensitive or strong-willed, would they have my personality or Jason’s, how long would it take for them to sleep through the night, what word would they say first, would they take a pacifier or throw it away like I did, how old would they be when they walked.

Our journey isn’t over yet. We will not give up. We are not moving on, we are moving forward. The answer isn’t no for us, it’s not yet. And in order to open another book, we needed to be able to close this one.