I am one of those people who cannot wait for the beta to find out if a cycle has been successful or not.
Rather I am one of those people who starts POAS (peeing on a stick) at 9 or 10 or 11 days past ovulation (DPO).
But because of the trigger shot in IVF, home pregnancy tests can be inaccurate. The trigger shot comes at the end of the stimuation phase, and they tell you to do the shot at a specific time about two days before your egg retrieval. The shot "finishes off" the eggs' development. And it is actually a shot of sythetic pregnancy hormone -- the kind that makes a pregnancy test positive. So if you take a home pregnancy test a day after you do the trigger shot, the home pregnancy test (HPT) will be show a very pronounced positive result.
But die hard POASers like me, we buy up cheap HPTs online and do a test every day from the day after the trigger. That way we see the line getting lighter and lighter until it goes away. Then we keep taking the tests every day to watch for the line to come back. And after such a long time of seeing just one lonely line on those freaking tests, I finally was seeing two.
So on the morning of my scheduled beta test, I already knew what the result would be. And after such a long wait to get pregnant, I was excited. Driving to the office in the morning I heard a jazz song from the 1970s for the first time. It was called Grazing in the Grass by Hugh Masekela. I later bought the CD.
The beta came back positive. I forget the exact number. But two days later it had doubled, and two weeks after that we went in for the first ultrasound appointment. We were disappointed that there was no heartbeat yet. Rather than wait two more weeks for another check, the RE let us come in the following week and we saw the heartbeat then.
The embryo was measuring slightly small, but no one seem overly concerned about it. Everthing was moving along fine. We were so happy. Experience should have told us that it wouldn't last.
