I'm Definitely Pregnant and I Didn't Even Undergo IVF?!!!

After my nurse coordination at the Victoria Fertility Centre emailed me a lab requisition the morning after my second pregnancy test, I reviewed with her when to take it. She said that I could take it at any time at any Life Labs location.

In the early afternoon, I went to a Life Labs and had more blood drawn. I asked the startled lab technician if I could have a picture of my vials of blood for my blog. Though she looked disturbed by my strange request, she consented.

What's my blog about? Ummm vampires and stuff . . .

Naturally I also had to take a selfie with my bandaged arm in the glamorously lit bathroom of the lab.

Who says cotton balls and paper tape can't be the "in" accessory this spring?

Then I went for a walk with my sister, mother, and little niece, and tried to put this momentous lab test out of my mind. My husband, at the office, was also distracted and unable to concentrate. We had agreed to not look at the results until we were together (I have an online account with Life Labs where I can log on and view my lab results when they are available).

I want to find out these results . . . but first let me take a selfie.

In the evening, we checked the online Life Labs results service multiple times but the results were not up yet. However, we checked one last time at 9:00 p.m. and there the results were. The hCG showed an abnormally high level that would coincide with being about four weeks pregnant. We couldn't believe it.

My lab test results

All of those years of wanting to get pregnant, waiting to be cleared to try to get pregnant, trying to get pregnant, being unable to get pregnant, and then finally deciding to undergo IVF to try to conceive in a last ditch effort, and suddenly we were pregnant without IVF while we were waiting to undergo IVF that very month.

We called our immediate families and told them the news. They were as happy and shocked as us.

We couldn't believe our good fortune.

The next morning, I received a call at 8:30 a.m. from my nurse coordinator. She had evidently checked my results as soon as she had entered the office and had called me immediately to review them with me. I was stunned, after years of received tepid attention in various medical realms in the public healthcare regime in Canada.

My nurse coordinator said that my hCG was good and that my progesterone was excellent. She said that my TSH (thyroid-stimulating hormone) was okay for now, but couldn't get much higher. She told me that I must go to the lab again in three days to have blood work repeated to see if my hCG levels are doubling like they should be every day and where my progesterone and TSH levels are (she had given me a two week standing order, so I could just return again to the same lab as before without a new requisition).

She said "well, I guess you didn't need us after all." I asked her if it could have been the sonohysterogram that could have helped us to conceive finally. She said that there isn't usually an increase in natural pregnancy following that procedure, but there is sometimes with the HSG test that I had had in the autumn. She wondered if it had been the Estrace that I was taking that had helped. She also said that it could have just been that things aligned this time.

But it's early days yet. We had already been warned by Dr. Hudson that we had at least a 20-25% chance of miscarriage just based on our age (this risk is further increased by thyroid problems in the mother).

While I'm happy, I'm also terrified that something that took so long to achieve could be erased in the blink of an eye and that we have practically no control over whether or not a miscarriage will occur. When I was contemplating this blog, I thought about what it would feel like if I did conceive and I shared this news to a group of complete strangers on the internet and then I had a miscarriage and felt compelled to update my blog with this devastating and deeply personal news. I wasn't sure whether I should share something this intimate, that you would normally only share with your family and perhaps a few very close friends, with an anonymous group of people reading my blog. As I considered it, I was again moved by the thousands of couples (just in Canada, multiply this over the world) who are impacted by infertility or fertility issues like miscarriages and the stigma and suffocating silence that surrounds these issues that are of paramount importance to not just the families that experience them, but also our society and the world as a whole. I want to destigmatize these "shameful" topics and try to increase the dialogue or at least knowledge that others have of these issues. It has been horrible suffering in almost complete silence all of these years and I am not going to be muffled by societal stigma anymore.

The first trimester is the riskiest time when most miscarriages occur, so for now we wait with bated breath. I will be posting about the advice that I receive from my various specialists, the further lab tests I must take, how I'm feeling, and how this pregnancy is progressing over the coming weeks.