Official Test Day - a cartography

The test from the clinic is cheap and basic, a plastic insult that will be the final say in how this has gone. It’s 4 am. Sleep has been thin and wired and It Is Time to find out what we think we know (whilst knowing we don’t). My hands are shaking. I wonder if everyone’s hands shake.

Job done. Had I drunk too much water? Do I turn the test over and wait, or stare at it unblinkingly?

But these are condensed memories of different times we pinned all of our hopes to the line.

I’ve turned tests over and I’ve held them and stared. I’ve torn digital tests apart, to be absolutely sure. I’ve seen the words Not Pregnant and felt their slap sting my entire being. I’ve seen two lines appear, throwing me into a new and unexpected dimension that felt as much like fear as excitement.

Official Test Day is a curious thing. We are given a date that exceeds when we could test and sent away, to wait and wonder, the ultimate demand of our patience. There will be no OTD’s the same world over. I call this a cartography to capture the varied textures of an experience that is both universal to the assisted conception community and wildly unique.

We might test daily, watching the HCG trigger shot disappear, taking pictures, looking at negatives, stacking them in a column, zooming into our images, throwing our vision off with lines that are not lines, or lines that might be, tomorrow, darker. Or not.

We might commit to a day of our choosing, a little earlier, but conservatively so. We might crack and not make it and test, then agonise over the possibility of the negative test simply being too early to tell. And it is agony.

We might wait and make it to the official day. We might do this to stay in a bubble where anything is possible, a Pregnant Until Proven Otherwise respite from it all. We might wait because we’re scared of this not working and don’t want to know that. OR because that is what we’ve been told, or that then, we will really -and unambiguously - know.

There isn’t a right way.

We can withstand what we can withstand. We get to choose, unchoose, change our minds, act impulsively or with precision. It all takes us to destination result anyway. We can be so unkind to ourselves and our body in trying times and this needn’t be another place to self berate.

And then there is afterwards. Two realms, polar opposites, that the lines usher us into. If I had to choose one word for how one line felt, it would be desolate. All that effort, all that investment, perhaps the pressures of juggling work, concealing our truths. All that waiting. All of that indescribable endurance and apprehension. It’s the cruelest outcome for a desire so simple, so easeful for many. But not us.

We are left reeling, back to the drawing board. Imagined due dates won’t happen. Time will be accrued, we’ll be older, we’ll be broker. We can’t capture the heaviness of this when we tell people it didn’t work this time.

There is another realm. Where a second line joins the first. A whole other mountain on the map. A story for another time perhaps.