No. 166 - The Bucket

It started seemingly a million years ago, our journey down the road trying to conceive again. We carried with us a big metal pail which was filled to the brim with Hope. It would slosh around as we walked, sometimes splashing out of the bucket to drop to the dust below. We had one child already; there was another pregnancy – though lost – we knew that WE could get pregnant and this relationship with our RE’s clinic would be over before it barely had a chance to begin.

My husband and I had a spring to our step back in August when we did our first IUI. We fully expected it to work, chalking up the past months of failure to poor timing. Those bouncy, confident steps resulted in our bucket carelessly jostled and a great deal of our Hope was absorbed into the ground when the HPT was negative.

The second IUI, we still had high expectations. We followed the clinic’s instructions to the letter, we treaded more slowly, but still confident that we would now certainly get pregnant. Again, more Hope was lost out of our bucket, plus I noticed that in our carelessness, tiny cracks were appearing, it had a couple dents, and the rim was starting to rust. It wasn’t the shiny container we had started with.

I tried to patch the bucket with the thought that once we did IVF, we would address directly the problems that appeared to have plagued our attempts, specifically fertilization of the egg through ICSI, and whatever Hope that was left would see us through a positive test as well as a healthy pregnancy. The patch proved to be temporary and the cracks and rusted seams seeped like wounds. Our bucket of Hope was nearly empty.

In six days, my beta is scheduled. I have purchased, in a moment of masochism and insanity, two 2-pack HPTs. If there is no second line, I will not bother getting the beta. I do not want to hear from my doctor again that I was on the wrong side of the numbers; or what our next options are. If this IVF fails, not only will we have reached the end of the road my husband and I started back in July, but the last of our Hope will have leaked or evaporated. Our bucket will be dry. There is no FET to fall back on. There will be no adoption papers to complete. There will only be an empty bucket. And for a long time after, my heart will feel just as tarnished, cracked and empty as that bucket.