If you can pay cash for your D&C, do. If you don't, you will receive a credit-card-bill-shaped reminder of events three and a half weeks after your loss.

I seem to have stopped bleeding. The internet tells me, "Sex can be very emotionally difficult, as it will remind you of the whole process of pregnancy and conception."

I guess eventually I was bound to find ART's silver lining.

I couldn't stop shaking. It started as soon as I entered the day surgery area, and continued for nearly an hour and a half, beyond the point the anaesthetist took my hand to look for a vein, and remarked, "Boy, you really are frightened."

"I think I'm just cold," I answered honestly. I certainly didn't feel frightened. I felt, kind of... numb. They brought me an extra blanket but the shivering continued. Then he gave me fentanyl, and it stopped.

As he made his preparations, he babbled on about the ring structures of various opioids, the logistics involved in anaesthetising patients for open-heart surgery, and the importance of not insisting you were allergy-free to the first four people who asked you and then, after getting a dose of intravenous kefzol, suddenly remarking that actually you are allergic to something, come to think of it, and it might have been an antibiotic, anyway all you can remember is you nearly died - which a patient had done to him on the previous day. Lastly, he told me it would be ok because this had happened to him and his wife and now they had an eighteen-year-old son and a seventeen-year-old daughter. I was about to make some sardonic remark about how few embryo transfers it must have taken for number two, but the next thing I remember is waking up, and it was all over, and I wasn't shaking any more.

I bled a little in recovery. It was like a heavy period at first, but lightened within a few hours. They gave me pain killers, which I considered taking, but the pain was never worse than menstrual pain and today I feel almost fine. Towards the end of my recovery I sent Mr Bea out for chocolates and a card. Since that first beta - gosh was it only in March? - the staff have been very kind. And it's good, once in a while, to encourage goodness in others.

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Speaking of which, don't forget to encourage Mel as she Walks America in support of the March of Dimes.