I cancelled my transfer, but then I did it anyway, and things do NOT look good

Okay. Lots has happened since my last post - too much to go through in detail, plus it basically all sucks so there's no point in moseying down memory lane. Here are the bullet points:

- My transfer was set to take place on Monday, December 9. I needed to work out a conflict with my work that day and tried to reach the nice nurse I've been working with, but instead talked with her colleague who I barely knew. The conversation went about as badly as it could have gone. I was hysterical and my husband had to pick me up from work, then I went home and sobbed for the next ~16 hours. I couldn't calm myself down. In desperation, around noon the next day, my husband actually called my parents and they dropped what they were doing to drive to our house and try to help me somehow. I ended up taking the 2nd Ativan of my entire life (the first was right before my egg retrieval, funnily enough) and ate some macaroni and cheese with my mom on our couch while she tried to console me, and finally I fell asleep for about 4 hours. It was one of the worst experiences of my entire life, but I mean, this whole process has been characterized by bad experiences so I feel like saying to that weekend oh, get in line.

- What happened during that conversation with the nurse to upset me so much? I apologize that I am unable to provide any details. That's because things finally got so bad with my clinic that I'm working with patient relations for their larger practice. The next (and final) time I speak with anyone from that office will be with a mediator present. However, I don't know when that will be, because the patient relations rep I spoke with said that she had to check with her supervisor and risk management before she gets back to me. Risk management… I wonder what I'm getting myself into.

- By Sunday afternoon, after I had told my parents the whole story of this cycle (they had no idea it was  even happening) and after lots of discussion with my husband, I made the extraordinarily difficult decision to cancel the transfer that was now tentatively scheduled for Tuesday AM. We were prepared to just walk away from the cycle altogether. I wrote to my clinic asking them to remove me from the schedule and everything. But…

- On Monday, I spoke with two additional physicians who urged me to go through with the transfer. One made kind of a deus ex machina maneuver and got us back on the schedule for Tuesday. Harry came with me to the appointment and mercifully I didn't have to interact with anyone who had been involved in my care to date. I shudder to think what the rest of the staff were told about me but we just stared straight ahead as we walked through the waiting room, talked with everyone as little as possible, and got out of there as soon as it was over. From a medical standpoint, the transfer itself was pretty straightforward. I did feel anxious to be back in that room again but I also felt so much anger by that point that the fear was pretty drowned out by the adrenaline coursing through my bloodstream.

- I felt some light cramping on Tuesday afternoon and some heavy cramps on Wednesday. I even had some very minimal spotting on Wednesday evening and Thursday that I thought might be implantation bleeding. However, this morning at 5dp5dt, I had a completely negative pregnancy test. Before you start thinking "wait, this sounds promising, don't give up hope yet!" I will also tell you that this afternoon I started bleeding heavily. The only conclusion I can draw is that the timing of my transfer got so screwed up that somehow I was insufficiently suppressed (maybe? I really have no idea) and we transferred the embryo into a uterus that was several days past when it could receive it. But yeah, I have my period, despite the progesterone-in-oil shots (which really do suck by the way, they are indeed very painful and upsetting) which I thought would keep the heavy bleeding at bay until my beta hCG blood test on Friday.

- This is the sort of thing that I would love to ask my clinic about, but I'm pretty definitively clinic-less since I have officially terminated my professional relationship with them. (Taylor Swift said it best.) I am thinking I'm going to ask my regular OB-Gyn if he would be willing to put in an order for a beta test to confirm the failure of this cycle, after which I will stop all medications. Other than that I don't have a plan. I'm mourning the loss of this potential little life, obviously. Our son was actually not the embryo that the clinic intended to transfer back in January 2012 - they were going to transfer embryo #1 but then #8 started hatching and they changed their plans at the last minute - and I was haunted by the thought of that switch. In a single moment, their fates changed and one went into the freezer and one went into my uterus and grew into a baby. Now, two years later, the unlucky embryo is disintegrating within me and the lucky embryo is upstairs sleeping peacefully in his crib. Oh, G-d, what have I done.