Things I never thought I'd wish for

Pretty high on my list of things I never thought I'd be wishing for: a negative pregnancy test. Well, I mean, sure, before I was married I wasn't praying for a positive pregnancy test either, but you know what I mean. The point is, I took a pregnancy test yesterday to see if there was enough HCG in my system to trigger a positive result. I figured this would save me the trouble of going to the lab today to get blood drawn unneccessarily. Since I need my level to be below 5 and the HPT I have reads anything above 30, I think, it would tell me if it was a useless endeavor.

Sure enough, I've never had a pregnancy test show such a definitive positive result. Nor have I seen the result appear so quickly. Yeah. So according to EPT, I'm still pregnant. Even though, you know, I'm not.

I wish there were some way to speed up the decline in HCG levels, because this is, for me, the really frustrating part. This time where I'm just sitting around waiting until I can start the clock on counting down four weeks until a provera cycle so I can move on with my life. But that clock doesn't start until my HCG levels drop below 5. So please, that negative pregnancy test can't come fast enough for me!

Sometimes I feel like my entire life revolves around my reproductive system. A friend of mine (a single, unattached, not-trying-to-have-babies friend) tells me that it's simply not true. That of course my whole life isn't about my reproductive health. But you know, in a lot of ways, my life DOES revolve around just that. I rearrange work schedules to accommodate appointments, I get back up child care for J when I have monitoring, I spend countless hours each week researching the latest and greatest in fertility science, or sometimes just reading blogs for personal accounts of this fun, fun journey. If I'm not actively in a treatment cycle, I'm spending my time either waiting for a beta, or waiting for the go ahead to start a new treatment cycle. Even now in my downtime, I've got three lab slips waiting in my bag to be taken to the lab at strategic times over the next six weeks or so. I'm still taking a prenatal vitamin. I still can't take effective migraine medicine. I still think about fertility/pregnancy/whatever at least 6 times an hour. So really, what part of my life doesn't revolve around my reproductive health? I am really, really ready to be on to the next stage of my life. Four years of total preoccupation is starting to get to me.