Am I Pregnant?

I've taken a whole lotta pregnancy tests in my lifetime. 

Because I have PCOS and no schedule to my periods (months and months in between them), I would have no natural indicator to lead me to suspect a pregnancy.  And because I spent a good portion of my adult life on depression medications that could hurt a fetus, I simply took a test every 2 months or so whenever I had an active sex life despite all of my precautions so I could switch to pregnancy safe behaviors as quickly as possible if needed.  Yes, I bought them in bulk at Costco.

And out of all of these tests, I had never seen one even pretend to hint at a pregnancy.

The hormone that those tests detect (HCG) is the same hormone that you are injected with to trigger your eggs near the end of the IVF process.  Therefore, if you test too early, you will get a false positive.  The test is detecting the leftover hormone from that injection and not the hormone that your body is producing.

So in between the egg retrieval and transfer of the embryos back into my body, I took a test.  I wanted to make sure that the chemical had dissipated and there would be no chance of a false positive.  The test was properly negative as it should have been.  So now I know, if a test shows up positive, it's actually positive.

It should take about 10 days for your body to produce enough of the hormone to show up on a test.  But I have no patience.  I got my collection of tests and decided to start testing on day 5.  And on day 5, a very, very faint second line was there.  I brought the test to my husband to see if he could see the line and as we squinted, yeah, we both think it's there.  Next day, yup, that second line is about halfway there.  Next day, several tests all saying I'm up with the duff!

SQUEEEEEEE!!!!!

This was also our first indication that it might be twins.  When we transferred the two embryos, we were told that we had a 60-70% chance of pregnancy, and a 50/50 chance of twins. 

The fact that the tests showed up positive so early indicated that I was producing a ton of the pregnancy hormone.

So we went in for our official blood test at the doctors office.  They look for a hormone level of anything above 50 to indicate a positive test.  I was at 266.4.  Uh, yeah, that's a whole lotta hormone!  Check a couple of days later because you want it to double.  It was over 600.  All the nurses are teasing me and the doctor with "What did you do!" cuz they all know what those numbers are meaning.  A couple of days later, we're over 1500. 

It's official.  I'm very pregnant!