As it sinks in

I cried during my anatomy scan last week.

The tech was looking at her heart, and identified the left ventricle.  And then she moved and the tech turned to a look at her spine.... and I spent a few minutes in a state of panic that perhaps there was still an unidentified heart issue.

Viking grabbed my toes, the tech asked if I need a tissue and I said no, and shut my eyes for a second.

Right now, she is healthy.  We are going to have a fetal echo next week (becoming standard practice for IVF patients), but the expectation is that we will be in the clear.

I was thinking of some women I know who have repeated donor egg ivf cycles fail.  Perhaps egg quality, perhaps immune responses, perhaps uterine issues, doctors don't know.

And I got to wondering why I got so lucky for this to work on the very first try.  Just one round of lupron, one round of progesterone injections.  Suddenly I am approaching 20 weeks, while women I know are bracing for their second or third cycle....

"How did this become so easy for us?" I said to Viking.

"Easy?  After everything you've been through?  I wouldn't call this easy."

Perspective gets skewed.  I can list five years of nightmares and traumas and rationally accept the difficulty to get to this point.  But now, as it sinks in, as I start wearing pants with stretchy waistlines and prepping for the months ahead, I still can't quite wrap my brain around it.

I am mostly calm.  But there's a sliver of me that is still gearing up for the bottom to fall out.