gray days

Saturday morning we got up at 5:30 and made a sleepy, cold trek to Ann Arbor to have my eggs harvested. Groggy after the extraction, I perked up when I heard a doctor announce the tally - 26 eggs. The nurse said she'd never seen a harvest so large. I returned to my sleepy state at ease.
Just a few days prior, I'd been notified that sometimes as few as 10 eggs are harvested. As some are lost at each stage of the process (maturity, fertilization, freezing, thawing, implantation), sometimes a couple is left with only one opportunity to create a pregnancy from this whole ordeal. Being that, for us, that chance is five years from now -five years later than we hoped we'd be trying to get pregnant- the idea that our chances rested on so few embryos with such a slim chance of being taken up by my uterus on the first and possibly only shot, well, it scared the shit out of me. One chance just didn't feel like enough. And it all but eliminated the possibility of surrogacy. We talked about starting a family earlier than the end of my Tamoxifen regimen. Generous friends offered up their wombs. It seemed tempting when I had in my head that there would be more than one opportunity to implant embryos. With so few on hand, the risk seemed great that they might be lost in one fell swoop; the idea that that effort might happen in someone else's body, negating my ability to carry the kid of my own genetic making, well, that scared the shit out of me, too. I spent the days in between that appointment and the harvest nervous, cautiously hopeful.
But 26 eggs! 26 eggs undoes those fears. At least, it undoes those fears until the doctor calls and says that only six of those eggs were mature, that of those six only three were successfully fertilized, that they might not all make it through freezing and thawing. When you get that phone call, 26 doesn't matter at all, except to intensify the blow, to suck the wind from sails inflated by high hopes. It's enough to send you running from the table where you are about to share lunch with a friend to sob in the handicapped stall of a public restroom while Rod Stewart plays just loudly enough to force you to ask the doctor to repeat everything he has to tell you. "Six?! As in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6? Six." And then, "Three?! Three. 3. 3?"
I am glad that that chance is out there, even if it feels so tenuous. But I'm exhausted by these let-downs. I'm not sure I can weather another. Maybe my attitude is all wrong. I just hoped that the failsafe would feel... safer.

In other news, let the countdown begin: Chemo starts one week from Wednesday.