Yesterday, Julia contemplated peeing on a stick at 4dp5dt and asked when others had received a positive pregnancy test after transfer. Today, the Times had an essay from a woman musing about home pregnancy tests, in which she confessed that she had kept the test that showed a positive for more than five years.
I never did that. Oh, I peed on sticks - but they were ovulation predictors - we were trying to time an endometrial biopsy. I never used an over the counter pregnancy test. I don't really know why. I'm too cheap? Too cheap to spend the money when I was going to have a beta anyway? I'm too quantitative? I'd rather have the concrete numbers provided by a quantitative beta HcG rather than a yes or no line. I'm too rational to have bothered with something that might provide a false negative? Besides, until 11dp3dt, I could pretend to be pregnant.
And in retrospect, knowing that quantitative number made a difference. The first IVF that worked had a beta of 23 at 11dp3dt. Things looked okay, okay, okay, BAM. No dice. The IVF that resulted in the now three and a half year old Miss M., who is right now "reading" books in her room instead of being asleep at 9:42pm OMG, had an initial beta (at 11dp3dt) of 113. And getting that good number eased some of the anxiety about a repeat of the first pregnancy that ended in that early miscarriage.
I have a box upstairs containing all of my positive pee sticks. I'm not sure why, but I can't bring myself to throw them out. Maybe I should go gaze at them when I am being driven to drink by the living, breathing children they represent.
ReplyDeleteLiterally the only physical object I kept from my failed pregnancy was the positive pregnancy test.
ReplyDeleteEverything else -- the ultrasound pictures, the pregnancy books, the birth certificate -- were so tainted with sorrow that I couldn't bear to have them around. The positive pregnancy test, on the other hand, represented the unalloyed happiness I felt at the very, very beginning when I was sure, because of how dark the second line was, that I was pregnant with twins.
I suppose I'll eventually throw it out too.
Our problem wasn't infertility but infrequent access to sperm, since we were flying our known donor in. I pored over those OPK peesticks for months and months before we started buying airplane tickets, and could never resist the pregnancy tests even when I knew it was too early to tell. But I didn't keep any and was dismayed to find that the pee-on-a-stick thing continued for sugar and protein monitoring. I have push-pull relationships with most of my obsessions.
ReplyDeleteOne of the things that makes me happiest about my recent decision not to try for #2 yet is that it has allowed me to postpone the return to peestick life. I think it was buying the kit that set off the low-level panice that prompted me to call off this year's attempt.