The Third Transfer

We tried for four years. Then three rounds of IVF, which is more than some people and far fewer than others.

I am not going to tell you how it ended, because that is the part people want and it is the part that makes this a different kind of story depending on the answer, and I would like it to be the same story either way.

What nobody explains about the calendar

Fertility treatment is administered in two-week blocks of hope. That is the actual unit.

You do the injections, which are fine, everyone makes a fuss about the injections and they are genuinely fine. You go in. Then you wait, and during the waiting you are simultaneously completely certain that it has worked and completely certain that it has not, and those two certainties take turns, sometimes within the same minute.

And you cannot say any of it out loud, because saying "I think it might have worked" out loud feels like tempting something, and saying "I do not think it has worked" out loud feels like giving up, and so you carry both silently for fourteen days while going to work and answering emails.

Three times I organised my entire interior life around a fortnight. The first two times, the answer came on a Tuesday morning, by telephone, while I was at my desk.

The first phone call

The first time, the person who rang was reading from something. I could hear it. The information was accurate and delivered in a professional order and it took about forty seconds and then she asked if I had any questions.

I said no. What I wanted to say was: I do not know what the questions are. I have just been told the thing I have arranged eight months of my life around has not happened, by a stranger, at my desk, at ten past nine on a Tuesday, and you would like me to have questions.

I went to a meeting about twenty minutes later. I do not remember it.

I am not angry with her. She had, I imagine, several of those calls to make that morning and no training in how to make them and no room booked to make them from. The system gave her forty seconds and a script.

The second phone call

The second time I knew, because I had learned what the phrasing of the first sentence tells you.

That one was worse, in a way I did not expect. The first failure is a disappointment. The second failure is information — it tells you something about the likely shape of the third, and the fourth, and about whether this is a thing that is going to happen to you at all. I stopped being someone who was waiting and became someone who was probably not going to. That is a different kind of day.

The third

The third time, a nurse rang who had been there at the transfer.

She did three things differently, and I have thought about them so many times that I can list them.

She asked if I was somewhere I could talk. I was, as it happened, in a stairwell, because by the third round I had learned to take those calls in a stairwell.

She told me straight away. She did not warm up. I am grateful for that — the warming up is unbearable, you know what is coming and you have to wait through a paragraph of context to get it.

And then, after she had told me, she said she was so sorry — and she used my name. Then she was quiet, and she stayed on the phone, and she let it be quiet for what must have been fifteen or twenty seconds.

She used my name. That is the thing I remember most clearly out of four years. Not a number, not a grade, not a protocol. She said my name, and she was sorry, and she did not rush to fill the silence with the next steps.

What I would ask of anyone who has to make that call

I understand that you will make hundreds of these and that I only received three. I understand that the emotional arithmetic is not the same on your side and that it cannot be.

But there are things that cost nothing.

Ask if I can talk. Tell me in the first sentence. Say you are sorry, if you are, and say my name. Then stop talking for a bit — the silence is not awkward, the silence is the only part of the call that is for me. And do not go through the next steps in the same breath, because I will not retain a word of it; send it in writing and offer to talk in a few days.

The clinical care I had was excellent throughout. Everybody was competent and most people were kind. But there are two or three moments in four years that I will remember for the rest of my life, and every single one of them was somebody taking fifteen unnecessary seconds.

Shared under a pen name, with my husband's agreement, because this story is not only mine. No clinic or staff member is named; the nurse who rang me the third time knows who she is and has my permission for this.