heartbeats

Mine: back to normal.
The babies’: 160 and 125. There’s really two of them in there, measuring right on track. I can’t quite believe it yet.

There was also a gray mass that may or may not be a subchorionic hematoma. My doctor wasn’t really worried about it so I’ll try not to, either. She said it meant I’d probably experience more bleeding (which for the moment has reduced itself to spotting, fortunately), and that, if I noticed something triggered bleeding, to maybe avoid that. Other than that it appears there’s not much I can do that would actually change the outcome. I’ll go back in 2 weeks for another ultrasound with my IVF clinic, but in the meantime should already try to contact the OB to get an appointment with them.

double, triple, quadruple…

Because of the weekend, my 2nd beta was 3 days after the first, so it had time to double. Which it did, and then some. We’re at 3602. My nurse was glad I gave her such happy news to communicate on her first day back :)
I wanted to write more but I am so tired, so that will have to wait for another day. But I had to share that amazing number with you.

the quantitative (and much longer) version

I almost didn’t want to come out of my happy this-might-have-worked bubble and face reality with HPTs or actual beta numbers. But Friday came, and I went to my 8:30am appointment. Asked, the woman said it’d take “at least 4 hours” to get the result. I spent some of those trying to be productive (ha!) but somehow ran out of patience* and tested. I saw my second line, first ever, just moments before Bunny’s sweet comment.

The men in my life had a funny reaction to this picture: My husband appeared unconvinced at the faint line. My brother asked rather bluntly what it meant. Turns out he didn’t know how these test work (“I have never peed on one of these” was his reasonable excuse) — he’s in med school**, but clearly specializing on other topics. To my great entertainment, my husband later peed on a stick and confirmed that he got no second line at all, not even a faint one.

I had emailed my nurse, and then her “vacation cover”, that I’d have a meeting mid-afternoon but would be reachable before and after that. A few minutes before the meeting, my phone rang. A very sweet nurse explained that the lab*** still didn’t have the results, but would have them in an hour, and that her colleague would later call me back. At that point I was (a) quite annoyed at the lab and (b) so glad I tested, I’d have freaked out. By 5:30pm, the nurse finally called. My beta is 886! Counting egg retrieval as ovulation, I should be 16dpo now, putting me closer to the center of the twin distribution than to that of singletons. We’d be happy with either. Next beta on Monday.

I still cannot quite believe it. I know there’s a number of hurdles ahead, but for now, please excuse me while I go celebrate with my husband. And thanks again for your support and your good thoughts!

* I’m not the most patient person in the world, so in a way it’s more surprising that I waited out until today than that I caved now…

** first year, and in my home country they start straight out of high school, but I was still a bit surprised…

*** unlike all my estrogen level blood draws, this one isn’t done in my clinic but in a lab covered by my insurance

Preliminary results

I was less convinced than ever this morning, my nurse is on holidays so I don’t even know who will call me, and I’m generally finding this 5h-wait worse than the 2ww. So I caved:

a random collection of nervous bullets

• Over the weekend I thought I might go back to some of the regular yoga exercises I had been doing previously, after two weeks of fertility yoga. Except on Monday morning I felt queasy, and on Tuesday it was pretty much all-day queasiness. My innards remind me of an active volcano, considering eruption (although fortunately so far nothing has actually happened yet). So I’m sticking with the laid-back version that just gives an extra Good Morning serving of oxygen to all my cells and embryos, and some sanity to me.
• My tight pants are too tight.
• H is getting increasingly worried about twins. The other day he threw two 20-sided dice – 2 and 2 came up. I keep telling him we haven’t even made it across the 50% barrier of getting pregnant at all, although I have to admit that I’m really hopeful at this point.
• I saw some cute shoes downtown. H asked to see them online. I had to laugh when I saw their name.

so much fat

Yesterday my clinic called me to ask how I’m doing in my 2ww, which I thought was very sweet of them. In fact, I had two presentations at work last week and have thus been so busy that sitting around and wondering wasn’t really an option. Not that I don’t think about our precious little embryos every day hour minute (ok, maybe every few minutes). But overall I’ve been remarkably calm, much in contrast to previous (natural) cycles that had me in tears about the possible outcome every other day.

I still don’t have many side effects, not even sore boobs, which I’ve definitely had in the past. The progesterone shots and the egg retrieval were the two parts of IVF I was physically most afraid of. After retrieval I was sore, but not worse than after my saline sonogram (though I’m sure the drugs helped). My husband is admirably performing the PIO shots, although his frequent comment on the fact that I have “so much fat” back there shadows the experience slightly. He’s quick to reassure that this only is a technical observation because he needs to get the needle into the muscle, but still, not what a girl wants to hear. Although, admittedly – the nurse offered to draw circles around the injection sites after retrieval, and when I took her up on it, she made smileys. Which I thought was cute and wanted to post here, until I saw the picture H took. My butt is so out of shape it isn’t pretty. (My front side is fine, if I may say so myself, so that sort of came as a surprise.)

Something – or, hopefully, someone – is pinching me from the inside every now and then. Beta on Friday. I hope this week will pass as quickly as the last one, and I so much hope we’ll get good news on Friday. Thanks for hoping with me :)

precious cargo

There’s a picture of two embryos on our fridge.

The embryologist called yesterday morning to let us know that all our 10 embryos were still growing (!) and that two beautiful ones were ear-marked for transfer. The other, while not in bad shape, had some degree of fragmentation, and they didn’t feel comfortable growing them out to blastocyst stage. So we came in for a day 3 transfer. Everything was fairly relaxed as we were the only patients at the time, probably because of the weekend. We went over all the embryo ratings — and then had to decide whether to transfer one or two. Previously we had mostly been talking about a blast transfer, in which case we’d have transferred one, so it was kind of an ad-hoc decision… we went with two, because a 50% chance of getting pregnant sounded better than a 30% chance, even if it includes a 25% chance of twins.

For the rest of the weekend I tried to take it easy, although sometimes it seemed that my body confused “resting” with “nesting”. I love these two little ones already and hope so much that at least one of them sticks around for the next 9 months.

There’s two embryos in my uterus, and seven more in cryo sleep. I can hardly believe it.

and then there were 10

Thanks again for all your good wishes, every single one of these messages makes me smile :)
All our 12 eggs were mature, and 10 fertilized! I feel so lucky. Sending many good thoughts across the city to my very own egg crate where they are sitting and dividing while my uterus and I get some extra rest in preparation for transfer.

a dozen

Thanks for all your well wishes! Everything went well this morning — my doctor said I made her nervous (and she doesn’t look like someone that would say this a lot), but that everything looked good.

A whole dozen eggs. Clearly more than I dared to hope for after the ultrasounds and estrogen levels. Now we hope that they like H’s sperm (at least enough to fertilize via ICSI) and then divide and grow…

… and up!

ER tomorrow. Wish me luck :)