On Tuesday, after my second beta test, I went home from work early so that I could receive the good or bad news in private. But my results had not ‘come back in time’, so not knowing when I would receive my results, I went into work on Wednesday. I was busy running around the office preparing for a one day workshop I was leading the next day when I received the phone call. You may know already that the news was ‘not good’. Receiving news like this whilst at work is difficult. My eyes were welling up when I dashed to the toilet quickly, passing one of my senior bosses and trying not to look him in the eye. I called Chris and had a good old cry – lucky there are not many women at my work to gate crash my pity parade. Chris said he would come to my work for a hug and he would be there in about 30 minutes. So I collected myself, and headed back to my desk. A colleague of mine who had promised to provide me some input to my project report for about 3 weeks decided to tell me he was not able to do it and he was going on leave the next day. Let’s just say, this was the wrong time to be telling me this. My attitude initially to him going on leave was….”and…..?????”. I had waited some time for his input and my report was already late. I said “No worries…..” in a very sarcastic and mean tone. Then my friend walked past us happy and bubbly….realised she had just interrupted something and asked if she should go, to which I nodded. Anyway, I was clearly in a grump.
After 40 minutes of being really pissy one minute, and on the verge of tears the next, Chris arrived at my work. We had a big hug and cry together in my work car park (parking lot). Chris stayed for a coffee, and we decided we would work from home for the rest of the day. I went back to my desk to finish off my preparations for the next day when my colleague (who I had been grumpy to) asked if everything was OK? So I told him about my phone call. I held back the tears as I said it, but said it was OK, I was going home for the afternoon, which he agreed I should do. I felt a little bit bad for my pissyness, but I know he understood that it wasn’t personal against him.
Thursday….I kept myself super busy at my workshop all day, I hardly stopped to think about anything else other than work. It was great!
Today, Friday, I had my third beta blood test. It didn’t start out great as my appointment was already eating into some ‘compulsory training’ time at work…and of course, the clinic had a waiting room FULL of patients. I was greeted by a nice enough nurse who I had never met before. I thought I had met them all!!!! In fact, it was very bizarre, I noticed that the receptionist was someone I had never met before, and all the other nurses I saw wondering around were all new. I wondered briefly if they had done ‘swap staff with another clinic’ day. V. weird. Anyway, the nurse who took my blood was pretty distracted by another nurse who was ‘in training’ (who at my last beta test, I blamed for my late result 🙂 ). They were gossiping, I did not appreciate a lack of attention when I was already upset with having to be there. Grrrr.
After I made into work this morning 40 minutes late, I sat in on about 1.5hrs of pointless training (I am actually already trained, and didn’t know they were going to be covering this same material). You can tell it was going to be a good day for me….not. The office was very quiet today, everyone was out on travel or on leave, which was probably a good thing, but I felt lonely. So I took myself off to a quiet empty meeting room and typed up notes from Thursday’s workshop to keep me busy…but it was slow going, my mind kept wondering to my results.
At 2pm my phone rang, I was surprised because the results weren’t due back til 3pm. It was the doctor who had done my egg retrieval and transfer calling with the bad news. He said my hCG levels were 395 (actually it turns out he was wrong, they were actually 345). My first response was wow it went up again, OK – I wasn’t expecting that! But he brought me back down to earth and said he did not believe this would be a normal pregnancy, he would expect an absolute minimum level of 800 by now, and I should stop taking my medications to prevent prolonging the pain (Emotional pain he meant), he did say that I could choose to stay on the meds if I wanted to be 110% sure, but he recommended to stop them. He also told me to arrange a follow up appointment with my doctor as soon as possible. And that was it. I actually did not cry, I was just confused. Sad, but confused. I stayed in my meeting room and focused on my task at hand, surprisingly I got a lot done in the next two hours.
It is so hard to not cry in front of work colleagues, but at the same time, being there has been a good thing when I needed to divert my mind’s wondering to sad things.
As I left work I received a phone call from my doctor, she started talking to me as if I did not know my results. However, she was far more informative about my results and what she wanted to do next. She told me that she agreed with the other doctor I should stop taking the medication, there is a very very small chance (about 1%) that this might be a viable pregnancy, but coming off the meds will not harm the developing foetus if in fact it is developing. By stopping the medication my body will be allowed to do what it probably would ordinarily have done and let me bleed. She wants to see me on Tuesday afternoon for an ultrasound and another beta test to be sure I do not have an ectopic pregnancy, although very unlikely, she wants to check. It is normal if I don’t start bleeding for another 4-5 days, but in the mean time if I get any sharp sudden pains or difficulty breathing to call her immediately. She also started talking about what we have in the freezer – we have just one blastocyst that was frozen on Day 5 stored away. They won’t do a transfer with just one frozen, so we would have to do another round of IVF. Can’t even think about that right now.
As soon as I got home I took off the estrogen patches from my stomach. It feels good to not have anything stuck there, and we don’t need to think about doing an injection either. I’m trying to think of the positives here!
The Great Pudding Club Hunt 