Okay. The story of the Three Pee Sticks... which will inevitably be disappointing.
But it goes a little something like this:
It's last Tuesday. I'm all proud of myself for NOT peeing on any sticks in advance of my test date. No premature testing for me! Not this time! No, I have self-control! Yay, me!!!
So I proudly drive across town to my doctor's office for a blood test.
Only when I get there, they don't have me on the bloodwork list. But a nurse checks my chart and gives me an order sheet and tells me to go on in, and I march in and hold out my arm, and the nice lady sticks a needle in there and takes some blood, and I'm so flustered I totally forget to pay and march right back out to my car. (It's okay, I have a big credit there from my IVF round.)
And then I wait.
At about two, the phone rings. It's my doctor. She's confused. Did I take a home pregnancy test yet?
HUNH???? I say.
Apparently, I was SUPPOSED TO take a home pregancy test. And THEN, if it was positive, come in for a blood test. But since I just showed up, the nurse assumed it was for Day 2 bloodwork, and they tested all the wrong things.
Upshot?
TAKE A HOME PREGNANCY TEST.
So I hang up the phone, and now I'm starting to freak out, because I really hate home pregnancy tests. They ALWAYS come up negative. Plus, I only have one in the medicine cabinet, and I know that's not going to be enough. No matter what it says, I'm going to want to take more than one.
I grab my friend Lesley, who has the good/bad luck to be staying with me for the week, and make her go to the drugstore with me. I'm in silent-grim mode. Because, one way or another, this is it. I'm not happy about the delay, I'm not happy about the mind you-know-what of the phone ringing and seeing it's my doctor and then GETTING NO ANSWER, I'm just downright not happy at this point.
I get two brands of tests, a multipack of each, and we head back to my house.
Where I then have to wait until I have to pee.
That takes about half an hour.
Finally, I pee on the stick.
And there slowly emerges a vertical line to go along with the horizontal control line.
Hmm.
I take it out and show it to Lesley. She agrees. There's a vertical line and a horizontal line. Also known as a plus sign. As in positive.
I text a picture of it WP. She confirms the sighting.
We're all very restrained at this point. Because this can't REALLY be happening, can it?
I wait forty-five minutes, and then I pee on a stick again. Different brand of test. On this one, I'm looking for two pink lines.
Sure enough. There's that second line, clear as day.
I show Lesley. This time there's a lot of laughing and not a few tears. I text another picture to WP. I email my doctor. She emails back "Yahoo!!!"
Lesley pours two glasses of champagne, and I admit it, I have a couple celebratory sips-- my last alcohol for a very long time, I hope.
And it's still not totally official, because thanks to the doctor's office snafoo (which was probably my fault), I won't be getting the blood test results until the next day.
Which is why when I wake up in the middle of the night and have to pee, I take yet another test.
This time, the vertical line comes up at the same exact time as horizontal line. And I figure that's good enough for me.
Still, I'm happy when my doctor calls the next morning and says "It's real!!" My beta was 82, which (according to her nurse) is "a good pregnancy." Because my beta is so high, I don't have to go in again until Wednesday of this week.
At which point I will be five weeks and one day pregnant.
Still, a long, long way to go. And I'm not holding my breath.
But I think (knock knock knock on wood) this one might be a keeper.
Recent Comments