Copy That, We Have Visual Confirmation

So although I was genuinely shocked yesterday when I got my lab results, I will confess to you now that it wasn't the first inkling I'd had that something weird might be happening down in ol' Uterustown. The sequence of events was as follows:

Monday - Embryo transfer in the morning, lay like a slug on the couch the rest of the day staring at the picture of my blastocyst. Cramps start around 3 PM.

Tuesday - Cramps continue and intensify.

Wednesday - Cramps continue and start to taper off in the afternoon/evening.

Thursday - Cramps are gone. Totally convinced that nothing was happening, besides the increasingly worrisome pain in my right leg.

Friday - Told I had a DVT in my calf and all hell breaks loose. Upon arriving home at 7 PM, decide to take a HPT even though it's only 4dp5dt since the result might have a huge effect on my treatment for the clot. It's negative, as expected. I sigh and toss it in the trash.

Saturday - Come down with a raging cold. Now I'm sneezing and coughing and my leg hurts and I'm lying around watching reality TV generally feeling sorry for myself. Near the end of the day I'm fooling around on my iPad and decide to Google side effects of Crinone, the progesterone gel I'm using instead of progesterone in oil. Sure enough, breast tenderness and enlargement are listed, which explains why the girls are starting to ache a bit. But then I look at a few message boards where women have discussed their experience with Crinone and most of them mentioned that their breasts started to hurt within a day or so of beginning Crinone, whereas mine only began aching a week and a half later. Huh. Before I go to bed, I take another HPT. It's also negative. This time I leave it on the edge of the sink and go to sleep.

Sunday - Harry was gone overnight, which was a good thing because I woke up early due to all the sneezing. This time I have some pretty concentrated urine to use for a test, so I take another one. It's negative again, so I flop back onto the bed and start Googling "6dp5dt BFN" to see whether it's possible that I might still be pregnant despite the negative result. But the cat is crying for his breakfast and the dog needs to go out for her walk so I drag my congested self out of bed to put in my contacts and start the day. I look back at the test and I see - no. No, wait, it's impossible. There's something there. It's a line. It's a faint line, but it's there. Wait, really? I have other tests under the sink. My hands are shaking so badly I can hardly get the box open. I take out a First Response Early Result, which is apparently the gold standard of early home pregnancy tests. While I'm waiting for the results, I compare the 6dp test to the 5dp test and the 4dp test. When you line them all up next to each other, you can see that there were very very faint lines after all. If I had seen them earlier, I would have chalked it up to wishful thinking or an evaporation error. I look back at the FRER. There are two lines on it. It's real. This is happening. I walk back into the bedroom and stare at my surroundings for a moment, bewildered, and then burst into tears. I think of Emma Thompson at the end of Sense and Sensibility when Hugh Grant tells her that he's not married and finally professes his love. I am not the only one crying. The cat is now standing on the bed meowing at me at the top of his little lungs that I am late in serving him breakfast. I can hear the dog down in the kitchen starting to whine that she needs to be let out. There is no choice but to start the day - pregnant. I am doing all of these things while I am pregnant.

When Harry comes home, I am incredibly impressed with my acting abilities. I'm in the kitchen doing food prep for the Superbowl later that night and I make some remarkably normal small talk. I say that I need his help changing the sheets on the bed and he follows me upstairs. We're standing next to the bathroom when my act starts to falter. I say weirdly "Oh, and there's something else I wanted to tell you" and I push the door open. I've lined all the tests up on the edge of the sink, including a digital with an unmistakable "Pregnant" result. He walks in, takes one look at them, and throws his arms around me. We're happy. We're freaked out. We're cautious because the lines are so faint. We're debating when to have a baby shower. We're wondering whether we should buy a house. We're speculating about whether it's a boy or a girl.

For your viewing pleasure, here's the picture of the FRER at 6dp5dt:

And here is the progression of Wondfo tests from 4dp5dt to this morning:

And while everything looks promising so far, I want to say that I have been convincing myself about once every hour since Sunday morning that this is a chemical pregnancy. Or that I am destined for an early miscarriage. Or a stillbirth. I'm so freaked out about all the things that can go wrong. I feel like I have never read a blog written by a woman who went through one IVF cycle and actually had a healthy pregnancy at the end of it. And those Wondfo tests are particularly worrisome: um, they are nowhere near as dark as I would like. If the amount of HCG in my body is doubling every day, then why aren't the lines twice as dark? I'm out of FRERs and I've debated buying more just to put my mind at ease, but that seems silly since my clinic is going to give me a much more accurate result after my second blood test tomorrow morning. And they're going to keep testing me to make sure my HCG keeps increasing, and then do ultrasounds to make sure that the pregnancy is progressing normally, and the reality is that this is a level of uncertainty I am just going to have to live with until the day I hold my baby in my arms. Then a whole new level of worrying will begin!

The only thing that helps is repeating a mantra that I've seen recommended for women who are pregnant again after a loss: "Today, I am pregnant." And it helps - today, I am pregnant. Today, I am grateful. There is nothing I can do except cultivate patience and calm for the tiny person growing in my belly. In a way, I think that everyone who gets pregnant after struggling with infertility has already struggled with a loss - the loss of our innocence. I feel joy about this pregnancy, but I know it can be taken away in an instant, so my joy is nearly equal to my terror. I also feel honored to have received so many positive comments on yesterday's post - thank you, thank you, thank you all. I hope to have more good news to report soon.