Seven Days Until FET

There are seven embryos sitting frozen less than four miles from where I'm sitting. Inside their nuclei are half of my genes, and half of Leah's. In seven days, two will be thawed out and put inside my wife's hopefully well-lined uterus.

I'm really, really excited. I don't think I go an hour without thinking of the embryos. They are clusters of six to eight cells, but I'm attached to them in a way that I really cannot explain. They're not alive, I don't think. They're definitely not progressing or growing. Do they have little souls? I don't really think so, although I pray that God watches over them and protects them every night before I go to sleep.

Leah is off the Lupron, and we're still a week away from the larger, scarier progesterone shot. She has started taking the little blue estridiol pill three times a day. I worry, because she has to take one of these pills when I'm not there to administer them. Leah is not very good at keeping a schedule. She's also not good about hearing or answering her phone when I call to check up on her. The last three days, she's taken her mid-day dosage two to four hours late. I'm telling myself that this doesn't matter, since over the course of a day this is really less than ten percent over time. Every cycle she's exhibited an "excellent" uterine lining, according to our doctors. I'm praying for Leah's uterus, as well.

Leah has also been taking 2 grams of Estrace. Estrace is a cream administered vaginally every night before bed. Leah may like the cream even less than she liked the injections. On the first night, she mis-loaded the applicator, and I had to take the thing apart and show her how it worked. Now, she kicks me out of the bedroom when she puts in the cream. I have no idea how this feels; originally, I thought that the estrogen cream would be applied to her hands or forearms like they do with menopausal women.

Leah says that she can feel the cream sloshing against her cervix all day. In another week, she'll be taking creams three times a day while she lies in bed reading and giving oral encouragement to our embryos to implant. She washes the applicator for five minutes every night before she falls asleep.

I can't remember the last time that Leah and I made love. She's nervous about the side effects that I might suffer from such close proximity to the cream. It's not really a stressor on our marriage. We're both working hard toward this goal, which now seems so close. We are close with one another--affectionate. We are kind of like preteens who are dating. We walk through the mall holding hands and pointing things out in the display windows. We neck with some light petting on the couch during commercial breaks or when the movie gets boring. I sometimes fear that this experience is prematurely aging our marraige. Maybe it just highlights the plateau that we've reached as a couple after eleven years together and over two years of marriage.