"So, When Will You Know?"

That is the #1 question we're hearing these days, right along with "How are you feeling?" for Shrike.

(Her left ovary is still a bit sore, from the stimulation and retrieval. She's not having any pregnancy symptoms yet, but she is taking progesterone, which could cause the very same symptoms anyway, so those won't mean much.)

So, since you may be wondering, here's how it's likely to go down.

We should get a call Mondayish, letting us know whether any of the embryos made it to cryo.

Having so many increases our chances, of course, but we didn't get any last time, despite the fact that they were very optimistic about it at 5 days, when we transferred Peeper and not-Peeper.

So, we're not really expecting to have any, but it would be great if we did - especially if it turns out that nobody's getting sticky right now.

Shrike did a pee stick yesterday to confirm that the HCG trigger shot is out of her system and she's testing negative right now, so any future positive tests that we might see are Hopper-related, not trigger-related.

(There might have been a ghost of a line after the 10 minute limit, but we couldn't make out anything before then, so we say it's cleared, especially since she won't be testing again for several days.)

Shrike's "official" beta, required by the study no matter what we've seen up until that point, is scheduled for May 5, which is eighteen days post retrieval, but you know damn well we're not waiting that long.
With Peeper, the first home test I did was at eleven days post-retrieval, and we had the faintest of positve results, so we figure that's a logical time to start testing.

That would be next Thursday, but since I bought ten tests (Dollar Tree, baby!) and she's only used one for the trigger, we have enough to start on Wednesday and test daily through the beta.

Wednesday is her birthday, so it would be all kinds of cool to get some good news that day, but it's so super-early for testing that we wouldn't get bad news, only no-news-yet.

(It's likely that the only reason I was testing positive so early with Peeper is that not-Peeper had implanted as well (which we know it - well, he, actually - did) and was still limping along at that point. My betas were all high for a singleton pregnancy, but low for twins - probably because we had one healthy and one not-at-all-healthy embryos at the time.)

Anyway - So, I'm thinking that we'll start testing on Wednesday and if we start seeing promising results on the two-line pee sticks, we'll go buy a digital and see what it says.

I don't want to buy one until we think we need it because a> they are about $15, and 2> I don't want to jinx anything and iii> that's the way we did it with Peeper, and that worked!

When I told the study nurses about how I'd sneaked to the lab for an early beta with Peeper, because I couldn't wait another four days, they said that we're welcome to beta before day 18, as long as we also have one on that day, no matter what the previous results were.

So, I talked to MidwifeK at Drinking Liberally on Thursday, and she said that of course! she'd be more than happy to order her a beta (or a few, depending on when we start) if she has a positive home test.

Of course, a lot of the reason we're doing that is just our impatience, and to reassure us that the numbers are going in the right direction, but also because if they are going the wrong direction, we need to know that too, rather than spending a week or so thinking we have good news that turns out to be bad news.

So, to summarize:

Hopsicle report Monday.
First pee stick Wednesday.
Beta when/if we see a positive pee stick.
Official beta on May 5.