I'm pregnant and it turns out that zombie body parts sometimes work. My zombie uterus has been supporting life for 14 weeks so far.
It was touch and go for a while after the embryo adoption and transfer in May.
One day before my scheduled HCG blood test, I took an HPT. It was negative. I cried. I knew, I just knew that there was no way I could be this far out from our transfer (11 days post transfer, 14 days past ovulation) and get a negative test.
The following day, I took my last HPT. There was a ghost of a ghost of a line. I mean, it was so light I stood in the bathroom for a very long time squinting at the stick. Then I called my DH in. He was skeptical and rightly so. We both wanted this baby to live so much that it hurt. It was easy to conclude the ghost line was more a product of an active imagination than the chemical presence of a miracle baby.
But I felt better. A line is a line is a line.
So I went to my blood test feeling somewhat hopeful. That would be the last hope I felt for about a month.
Later that afternoon my doctor called. It was the doctor, not the nurse. That's never a good sign. He was calling to tell me my HCG result was 29.
I bit my lip and pinched the bridge of my nose to keep the tears at bay. 29 was very low. It was ridiculously low. I knew what it meant, even though the doctor was nothing but positive. He said there we'd wait and see what the next numbers were. But I knew that a 29 meant that this was probably not a viable pregnancy.
Two days later. Lather, rinse, repeat. I was at 62 and in agony.
I shut myself inside my bedroom and wept. Sixty-freeking-two at 17 days post ovulation. That's a failing pregnancy. That's a dying baby. Still, my doctor, who once again called me, said this baby had a 50-50 shot.
My mom and dad were visiting. My mom went off for a walk when I told her, tears streaming down my face, that her fifth living grandchild was on its way to becoming her 12th miscarried grandchild. We didn't tell the kids anything during this time. We just held on and waited for the numbers to drop. Or rather, that's what I did.
Every time I did an internet search of "low HCG" or "low HCG success stories" I got tale after sad tale of miscarriages and chemical pregnancies. I found a total of five stories where the moms gave birth to a healthy baby. There were tens, probably hundreds, of heartbreaking stories. Babies lost a 4 weeks, 5 weeks, 6 weeks. Babies lost after what seemed to be a perfect rise in HCG levels. There was a depressing medical study quoted over and over by savvy net-moms that gave my baby a thirty percent chance of live birth.
DH, who is an eternal pessimist and is currently obsessed with Ebola, was calm and even peaceful while I was falling apart. He said, "You're planning a funeral for a child who is alive. You're acting like this pregnancy is already over. Stop it. You need to be happy for the gift we have right now. You're pregnant." He hugged me and a huge "proud papa" grin spread across his face. "You're pregnant right now. Enjoy it!"
He was so right but what a struggle it was to enjoy something I was convinced I was going to lose. Every few days for two weeks, I went in for blood work. The numbers slowly climbed but there was never the huge jump I had seen with my first two pregnancies. This baby, this pregnancy, was slow to rise but the rise was steady and doubling as it should.
Finally after two weeks, the doctor stopped the blood work and told me to schedule an ultrasound. I thought I was 5 weeks and 6 days when I went in, which was just barely, barely far enough along to sometimes see a heartbeat.
It was the Feast of St. Anthony, finder of lost things. Since he's so good at finding lost things and since me and St. Tony go way back, (for a while had quite a contentious relationship) I asked him to help us find the baby's heartbeat.
I desperately needed to see the heartbeat.
It was ridiculously early to expect that we'd see one. And when they got the ultrasound on the baby, we realized that seeing a heartbeat was going to be even more difficult than we thought. The baby measured 5 weeks 4 days.
Probable late implantation, smaller baby, it didn't look good.
But then it all came into focus.
The sonographer sounded awed when he said, "This is the earliest I've ever seen the heartbeat. It's right there." He pointed to a flicker on the screen.
DH counted the beats. 120 beats per minute.
The heart was strong. The baby, the tiny, bitty, smaller than a sesame seed baby, was miraculously alive. A sesame seed, people! We saw a heart beat inside a baby who was the size of a sesame seed. God is completely amazing. So was the guy who did the ultrasound.
Now, I'm 14 weeks. The morning sickness is gradually getting better. I'm still easily tired. I have an inexplicable case of hives that come and go and get worse when my nausea is especially bad. I crave cream cheese. I can't tolerate sugar. Mexican food, my usual stand-by when pregnant, makes me sick.
So yeah, I'm pregnant. All bets are that it's a girl but we won't find out for sure for a few more weeks.
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