One of the reasons why I started taking pregnancy tests way last Wednesday (after I swore i wouldn't) was that I had started to feel a little bit of nausea.  Not really nausea, more like a loss of appetite.  That's never happened during a cycle before, positive or negative.

This was nice, because I have had every pregnancy symptom there is and then a negative result.  Weird cramping, weird sex dreams, pulling pains in the groin, tiredness, dizziness, that rubber-chicken woozy feeliing, to name a few.  I have fallen for them all and then been disappointed when I had a negative result.

So I had sworn off all pregnancy symptoms for the cheats they were. 

But for anything to disrupt my ongoing love affair with food - that was new.   I was wishing I could bottle that feeling because I just didn't care what I ate or if I did.  About once a day I felt hungry but I still felt picky about what I wanted to eat.  So I started the peestick testing at home and the sticks were positive.

Then over the weekend i started feeling more nauseated, then I got the first beta at such a high number.

Then yesterday, the day of my second beta, I woke up nausea-free.  Not complete back to my old food-loving self, but still.  I worried and worried this THIS would be the beta that fades, or falls.  That this would be another chemical, a pregnancy that just doesn't hang on.  I researched obsessively the correlation of a high beta with pregnancy success.  (There is some, but it's the doubling or increase between betas 1 and 2 that matters more). 

Finally I had to just suck it up and wait for the bloodwork, the phone call, the news.

I was in the car with my husband in the middle of a long, trying day of errands and electricians and long drives to the clinic. 

The minute I heard my physician's assistant / IVF coordinator's voice on the phone I knew it was good news.  Second beta: 1495.  Almost tripled.

Once I got done sobbing with relief, I remembered her telling me to come in for ultrasound on Monday.  I had been hoping they would do the u/s on Friday.  My research (my fancy name for obsessive Googling) told me that when the beta levels top 1200, the developing embryo can be seen on the ultrasound.  I'm already past that, so why not Friday, I wondered?

Then I remembered that my last pregnancy, in November, started out with good numbers too.  (Not like these, but very strong: 227 and 600 something).  At the ultrasound there was a gestational sac clearly seen - in my fallopian tube.  An ectopic pregnancy.  We were so devastated.

So the ultrasound isn't all rainbows and sunshine - it's a return to the scene of last year's trauma.  While Friday seems like plenty of time to see anything developing, it might be too soon.  I might be lying there with my feet in the stirrups while the ultrasound tech is silent and finally tells me she can't see anything in my uterus.  Just like last time.  And yes, I could come back on Monday and then they'd see one or two babies and everything would be great.  Except for the weekend of total worry.

So I'm happy to wait until Monday.   Also, if there are two embryos in there, that would explain the high beta numbers.  But that means that developmentally, they're only half as far as the numbers say.  If on Friday my beta levels have increased to 3000, doubling from Wednesday, two embryos would account for only 1500 each of that number, which is just barely above the threshold of visibility via ultrasound and there we would be, possibly not seeing anything.

So I'm going to enjoy the weekend and hope for the best for Monday.