Schrödinger’s Uterus

They warn you at California Conceptions not to pee on a stick before your official beta test (quantitative blood pregnancy test). You can get false negatives (which in a few cases has disastrously resulted in women stopping their meds and losing what otherwise could have been a viable pregnancy) and false positives (which raise hopes only to dash them).

But I also know labs can make mistakes (or just be freakishly unclear), so it makes sense to take a test or two as a back-up. Plus I’d rather find out in the privacy of my own bathroom than on an impersonal (or even cruel) phone call.

Oddly, CC is having me take my beta test at only (the equivalent of) 13 days past ovulation. My Turkish doctor didn’t have me test until 18dpo. I managed that time to hold out until 15dpo to take a urine test, and even then it was fairly faint — faint enough that I had to run to the internet to figure out it was a positive — but my beta number was still good. (Sadly, that pregnancy ended two weeks later.)

Anyway, I took a test at 4am today (12dpo — also the full Wolf Moon) and watched it like a hawk for five minutes. For the first three minutes — nothing. My heart didn’t so much sink as check out, throwing its hands up and walking out of the room. So tired of this crap.

But then… there was something. So faint, so very desperately faint, but something. I grabbed another test, a purple Wal-Mart cheapie, and tried again. This time truly nothing.

I went back to bed with no idea how to feel.

I got up again at 8:30 and tried again. The line didn’t appear until around 4 minutes had passed. And again, it was so faint I wondered if my eyes were playing tricks. At first I could only see if when the light hit it right. Here’s a picture, while it was still damp (so it’s probably not an evaporation line):

It’s… something. Maybe. Hell, you never really know until the kid finishes college, right? And even then I’m sure there’s still worry to come.

Ha. Good Lord they don’t make this ‘being human’ business easy. At least not if you care about things.

The good ol’ internet has let me know that plenty of successful pregnancies didn’t show a positive at all until 14dpo or later. And I don’t seem to have much luck with pee sticks in general. Ovulation predictor test strips never get as dark as the control line for me. Maybe I drink too much water?

I’m trying, again, to take it a day at a time. To have a little faith, not that things will always turn out like I want them to, but that life is good anyway, and we’ll survive either way.

Quantitative beta tomorrow, then again on Monday to find out if it’s rising properly.

And on and on it goes. But at least, for now, the cat is not definitively dead.