I am so glad I did. If I hadn't we would have gone in for the ultrasound this morning. The ultrasound would have been inconclusive -- something that looks like a sac and pole, but no heart beat. That's not at all unusual for 6 weeks 2 days gestation. Now, probably I would have asked for more bloodwork to test the progesterone levels. If I had I would have gotten The News via telephone in the late afternoon, or I don't know, maybe they wouldn't have given me The News over the phone, maybe they would have made me come into the office, and I would have known exactly what that meant and it would have been torture.
In another dimension, I might not have asked for repeat bloodwork. They don't do it routinely once you start ultrasounds. Since the ultrasound would have been inconclusive, they'd have had me come back in a week, or even two weeks. All that time I would have been taking progesterone shots, which would have kept my body from bleeding on its own. I could have easily spent another two weeks believing this was viable and googling "6w2d ultrasound no h/b sac". I am unutterably grateful that I did not have to go through that.
Of the possible worlds in which this pregnancy isn't viable, I am living in one of the best of them. Granted, it would have been even better if I'd peed on that stick on, say, Monday, or repeated my beta then; we could have seen it falling, and falling betas are never okay when you did a single embryo transfer (they can be less dire if they represent a disappearing twin/triplet in a multiple pregnancy). But I still did pretty well.
Next time you can bet your booty that I'll be peeing on one of those sticks every half hour. As it is, I don't have to give them up altogether. I'm still peeing on one every morning. This morning's was very light, maybe half the strength of the previous one. That's a good thing. The sooner my hCG levels fall, the sooner we can try again.
I don't know yet how we'll try again. I'm not going to do another fresh IVF immediately. I had no idea how hard it would be on my body. I can't risk OHSS and another two weeks off work again. I managed to excuse this last one with a vague "emergency minor surgery" (whatever that means) but I think it'd be a little fishy if I tried that again in 8 weeks. I think the next cycle will be IUI. Chances of success with an IUI are low, which makes it sort of a nice compromise between "doing nothing" and "jumping right back in".
Luckily I have some time to think. Next cycle will probably be minimum 6 weeks from the time I start to bleed, and lord knows when that will be. It's frustrating, not knowing how long I'll be benched. Hey I used a sportsball metaphor, go me. That's a little of the yang energy I need, huh?
Overall, I'm doing okay. I have been "trying to conceive and not pregnant" for 16 months. I was pregnant for 2 1/2 weeks. Really, the pregnant mindframe was the one that was a constant stretch for me. This feels familiar.
Here, I have a perfectly good highway metaphor in my blog name. It's metaphor time.
This is a little bit like driving around lost. You have a limited amount of gas and you have to be somewhere by a specific time. You're driving down this featureless highway and you think you're going in the right direction, but you might not be. Finally there's an exit. Whoopee! Except that it dumps you right back on the same road, which is exactly as inscrutable as it was before. What the heck. Better signage, people. What was the point of that exercise, exactly?
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