11 1/2 Weeks! And an Update

11 Weeks and 5 days! Yippee! Saturday I will be 12 weeks pregnant, right on the cusp of the second trimester!  Yeah, I’m a little excited about that! 

So, update: I went to see my perinatologist a couple weeks ago. When they did their fancy ultrasound we found that the hemorrhage that was around Baby A was gone!!!! Prayers answered! And the hemorrhage around Baby B was still present, but it is small. The doctor said he wasn’t too concerned about it. He gave me much more detail about how these things can happen and what they are. Very nice to hear since no one has been able to tell us anything until him. Baby B still has less room in their embryonic sac, but they are only measuring 4 days (as of two weeks ago) smaller than Baby A. This is good; it means that they are basically concordant in their growth. But we will be monitoring B’s growth, definitely through the first trimester. 

We actually bought a home Doppler and around 11 weeks I was finally able to hear the horse stampede of baby heartbeats at home. This is so reassuring! Sometimes I check a couple times a day. That bleeding early on was so scary. I want to always be able to check and see that there are two heartbeats without having to go to the ER for an ultrasound. 

I go tomorrow (Friday) for a visit with a new, closer, OB and I hope all goes well. I am seeing their Nurse Practitioner and hopefully they do an ultrasound. The following Monday I go back to see the Peri for my anatomy scan and if they can see they will tell me genders!! 

Get your gender guesses in now. My guess is Baby B is a girl and Baby A is a boy…

10 Weeks Pregnant and a Hemorrhage or Two

To update things, I am 10 weeks pregnant today! Yippee! That means I am only 2 weeks away from the 2nd trimester, or "out of the woods" as some would call it. Everything has been going pretty well, just as it did last time. I have extreme nausea, I pee constantly (6 times a night) I am exhausted. My back side hurts from progesterone shots. I am STARVING every 1.5 hours, which is new this time around. Oh, and I have extremely dry skin and my nails are ripping under the nail bed. Ouch. 

New this time: There is a new extended release nausea medication called Diclegis which works wonder. Oh, and bleeding. I had a gush of light colored bleeding on Thursday January 2nd. I was told to go to the ER, where they found that Baby A had a small hemorrhage. But no one there could tell me much about it. Neither did the new doctor on call at my OB's office. I continued to have light brown bleeding until Saturday morning, when I had bright fresh blood. I again went to the ER and they found another hemorrhage, this time around Baby B. 

Total freak out moments here. I never had bleeding before. Very scary. A girl I know had a hemorrhage, but it was very large, and she miscarried. No one could give me much information. Not what to expect, not our chances of survival, not what is normal. Nada. They also found that Baby B's gestational sac is much smaller than Baby A's. 

 So I called my perinatologist (high risk doctor) from my last pregnancy and they agreed to see me earlier than 12 weeks. But they couldn’t see me for over a week. 

I had that appointment yesterday. Glory to God both babies still had strong heartbeats and were moving around! The hemorrhage on Baby A has disappeared and the second one is very small. The doc wasn't worried about them. He also found that the twins are only 4 days apart in growth which isn’t too bad. He wants to monitor Baby B's growth. But in general things look pretty good. He says once we enter the 2nd trimester we won’t have to worry as much about Baby B.

So prayers please. Pray that the hemorrhage around Baby B gets absorbed safely into my body and that both babies continue to grow and develop as they should.

Beta #2

The results are in! My BHCG went from 424 on Monday to 1,614 Wednesday, today! Yippee! That is almost a quadruple increase. Multiples maybe? Leave your guesses in the comments below :) 

Katie said I would have my instructions for my 6 and 9 week ultrasound by friday, along with my due date :)

Beta: Double or Nothing

Yesterday, Monday, I had my first Beta test. As always, there was drama associated with it. The place I had my appointment with, as it turns out, doesn’t do same day STAT lab work, which is required. So I had to scramble to find a new site, which included calling my insurance, yay. Once I got my blood drawn at our local hospital, I found out that they do the Quant HCG testing there (Beta) but have to send out for my progesterone levels to their sister hospital. Ugh…so of course I had to chase down results and found out that if the NEDC didn’t call to request my results, there was no telling when they would be sent.

So around 3:20 yesterday, I received the call from the NEDC confirming that I am pregnant! Officially! My HCG number is 424 and my progesterone is great at 38!! Yay! When Katie from the NEDC called, she knew I had cheated and POAS, and I admitted to 3 of them! But it was nice to have the blood work confirm it. I go tomorrow, Wednesday, for my second Beta to make sure my HCG numbers are doubling, which is indicative of a progressing pregnancy.

Last time, when I was pregnant with twins, my HCG at my first Beta was in the 600’s and now it’s in the 400’s. I have read that the size of your HCG number isn’t always an indicator of multiples, so we will have to wait until my 6week ultrasound for that news. I will post my results from tomorrow as soon as I can!

How am I feeling? Tired, irritable, and really nauseas.

So I cheated…. I peed on a stick…

As you may or may not know, Thanksgiving was 9dpt for us, with multicell embryos. According to the medical field, on day 9 and 10 there isn’t enough HCG in the body to register on a home pregnancy test. This is why the NEDC asks you to not test at home, and to wait until 11dpt to go get Beta blood work done. 

I cheated. While in TN for the transfer we bought a 2 pack box of First Response pregnancy tests while at Babies R Us. So I was already planning on cheating before the transfer even happened. My husband wanted me to wait until today, Saturday (11dpt) to take a home test. He doesn’t want me to test early and get a disappointing negative, when I could actually be pregnant, but it’s just too early to test. 

I slowly whittled him down until he agreed that we could test on Thanksgiving. Last year, last pregnancy, we test on Memorial Day. I thought it only fitting to test on a holiday this year! I was so worried that I would wake up having to pee really bad and would lose my “first mornings urine “so Wednesday night I laid out a pregnancy test in front of the toilet so I couldn’t forget. That night, I dreamed that I took a test and it was positive. I then immediately dreamed that I took a test and it was negative…

At 5 am on Thursday, Thanksgiving, I peed on a stick. Last time I did this, it was 13dpt (or 11?) and the “pregnant” lines came up immediately on the stick. This time I knew I was testing early. I went into this fully aware that I could get a false negative. But I prayed that God would give me an early sneak peek if I was pregnant.

So I peed. And watched it spread across the testing screen. The “test” line popped up and nothing else. 2 lines, you are pregnant; just the test line, not pregnant. So, with a heavy heart I set the test down to wait. The instructions say to check the test in 3 minutes. I determined that I wasn’t going to torture myself by staring at a test stick for 3 minutes, just waiting for something that may never show. So I lay back down in bed for 3 minutes. 

When 3 minutes had passed, I jumped up to go look. Here is what I found:

PREGNANT! One line was fainter than the other, so I scoured the instructions which clearly showed my example and said that one line may be fainter than the other. But that any 2 lines meant you are pregnant. Okay, wow. We are pregnant. And we found out at 9dpt, impossible. Thank you God! We found out on Thanksgiving, and what a thing to be thankful for. 

Now of course, I took another test the next day. The test I took Thursday can read VERY low levels of HCG so I took a cheap test on Friday, which could only read high levels of HCG (which I shouldn’t have yet). I figured that if this one came back pregnant, then I really was pregnant and or I had multiples lol. In less than a minute the result was clear: pregnant! Fast forward to today, I had an extra test, so I took it!! And of course, it was positive! I think it is safe to say: WE ARE PREGNANT AGAIN! 

One of the reasons I took so many tests was to kind of do my own Beta testing. They make you test and then re-test in 2 days to make sure your “levels” are doubling or growing. I think the speed in which the home tests continued to show results sort of said my levels are doubling. 

I still have to go Monday for the blood work, and then wait for the NEDC to call me to tell me I am pregnant. And then I have to act surprised. But I know that 23 people have to go get that blood work for the NEDC due to the holiday, so I know it will be awhile before I get that phone call from them. 

P.S. Wahoo!

Alpha, Beta...Never?

If you have been following our story for a while, you may recall that with our last transfer back in 2012 we had issues with our Beta (bloodwork) pregnancy testing. Last year we were supposed to get lab work done on the 11th day after our transfer, which just happened to fall on a Sunday. A no go for the NEDC. The 12th day was Monday, I believe it was Memorial Day, so again, no beta. We had to wait until the 13th day to go get our Beta testing done. So of course I took a HPT on Memorial day, and it was BFP!

So here we are in 2013, 7 days post transfer (7dpt) and we are waiting for our Beta. The NEDC once again told us we needed to wait 11 days to get our Beta done. Surprise, surprise, the 11th day falls on a Saturday. So you guessed right, that means we once again will not get to Beta test until the 13th day. I feel like Ferris Beuller. Strange; same embryo number and condition as last time AND we have to wait the 13 days again....perhaps that is a sign. I am going to take it as one :)

I continue to feel nauseous all day. I am exhausted. I have headaches. I even think I am starting to have cravings, the same ones as last time...I also felt another "twinge" today! Go babies go! This time around I may take a HPT on Thanksgiving, with the understanding that it is only 9dpt and will most likely be negative, even if I really am pregnant. I found a great site by NYU that explains what happens after a Frozen Embryo Transfer (FET). If you check this site out, we are a 3 day transfer (I believe) and if that is the case, the NEDC is correct in saying not to test until day 11, which is when HCG can be detected... But I am impatient.

Happy Thanksgiving! I will let ya'll know if I test :)

Our 2013 Frozen Embryo Transfer is Complete!

This past Tuesday, 11/19/13, we had our second transfer! We arrived in TN on Sunday evening and relaxed with friends. It is always so nice to see our TN family; our friends there truly are family to us. Monday was a beautiful day, sunny and in the 60’s outside. A lovely friend of ours did a family photo shoot for us and she took some amazing photos! Half of the time Monday my mind was preoccupied with our 10 m/o twins, and it felt like any other day. Then I would suddenly remember that our transfer was the next day and get a flurry of excitement! I tend to detach from emotional situations…so I wasn’t nervous or anxious. 

I think that it helped that I had been through this transfer before; I knew what to expect. Tuesday morning rolled around and I was psyched! Last time our appointment was at 7:30am, so it was brutal. This time though, our appointment was at 10:15am so we didn’t have to arrive until 9:45am. This was so nice. We slept in a little, had coffee (decaf of course) and even swung by Chick Fi La. It was a leisure morning.

 I have learned, after 3 ultrasound appointments at the NEDC that I have a small bladder and do not have to drink quite so much! Thankfully I learned this and only drank a small percentage of what they asked. But just so you know, my bladder was FULL and it hurt! In fact, my bladder was so full they told me to go empty it some! I was much obliged! **Just a note here, do not follow my actions; drink what they tell you to! They told me I was the first patient all morning that had a full enough bladder. If you are not full enough they will insert a catheter into your bladder and fill it. It is painful. So please follow their directions**

Medication protocol dictated that I take 600mg ibuprofen, 1 albuterol and 10mg valium…That kicked my but this time! Even with eating breakfast right before I took it! In 15 minutes I was wobbly and felt a little out of it. The point is to be relaxed, and I guess I was! Dr. Keenan and Carol, the embryologist, came in to see us. They told us that they had thawed our 4 remaining multicell embryos and that 3 had survived! 2 were top quality (rating 1 out of 5) and 1 was lower quality (rating 4 out of 5). This was the exact same setup as 2012! We had 3 embryos survive the thaw and they were of the same quality! And we ended up with beautiful twins.

The actual transfer went quickly. The worst parts are the ultrasound wand being pressed onto your full bladder, and the alcohol swab they sterilize you inside and out with. It hasn’t ceased to amaze me to watch that catheter, holding life, slide through my cervix and into my womb! Afterwards, they tell you to rest and not lift for 24hrs. It was more difficult this time because of the twins. But it was a nice rest. I was so loopy, I left my cell phone at the place we had lunch at!

Within 24hrs I felt a “twinge” on 1 side, and I felt 2 twinges with the twins. It was way too soon for implantation I believe but it was exciting! I have had a good amount of cramping, and I just recently started to be nauseous…a lot. Woohoo! I will let you all know as soon as I find anything out!