Embryo Number Seven Was the One

For four years, my body felt like a question no one could answer. Two IUIs, two failed transfers, one early loss. By the time we started our third IVF cycle, I had stopped decorating hope. I just went to the clinic, rolled up my sleeve, and let them do what they needed to.

I gave myself the injections in the bathroom at work, timer on my phone, ice cube pressed to my stomach first. My husband learned to mix the medication when my hands shook too much. We didn't tell our families. I couldn't bear the weight of their hope on top of my own.

The embryologist called ours "a good cohort." I hated how clinical it sounded — these were not statistics to me, they were maybes I had already loved. Seven embryos. Six did not make it to where they needed to be. The seventh did.

The two-week wait was its own country. I peed on a stick three days early because I am human, and saw the faintest second line, so faint I made my husband look under three different lights. He cried before I did. We sat on the bathroom floor at 6 a.m., both of us shaking, afraid to say it out loud in case saying it broke it.

She is eighteen months old now. She has my husband's stubborn chin and a laugh that fills the whole flat. Sometimes, when she's asleep on my chest, I think about embryo number seven and how close we came to never knowing her.

If you are in the middle of it — the needles, the waiting, the bargaining with the universe — I won't tell you it always works, because that wouldn't be honest. But I will tell you that the version of me on that bathroom floor had no idea what was coming, and I'm so glad she kept going one more time.