Endlich hat es geklappt - positive beta results

I don't even know how to write this; I gave up on this cycle some time over the weekend, sure that it had failed again. Regardless of outcome, R and I had pretty much decided that this was going to be our last attempt and in my head I'd already moved on to thinking about all the good things about having a single child, all the small freedoms it might allow, all the ways I love that Small Boy is the only planet in our sky. I'd already decided that it was over and that I was happy. I didn't even know what to say when Frau S gave us our beta of 214 - nicely pregnant, though a single beta test is just that: a number. It's a nice little number, for sure, but until I see a heartbeat it's just a hormone coursing through my blood stream.

Not everybody reacts the same way, but infertility robs a lot of couples of our calm, of our ability to just believe that it worked, finally, and that everything is going to be fine. If you've read enough blogs and message boards, you know that everything might not be fine. You've seen time and again how fragile and arbitrary the distribution of luck is. You know too much (you've got that medical degree from Google University, after all, hanging on the wall just above the drawer where you keep your leftover needles and alcohol wipes), you've read too many times of how it all went wrong after it seemed to all be going right.

I was 18 weeks pregnant with Small Boy before we told R's parents. Eighteen weeks. Needless to say, they weren't exactly surprised - we see them every week after all. But there are all these dangerous milestones to get past. First ultrasound, see the heartbeat. The dangerous 6 to 8 week zone. Going off the progesterone at about 12 weeks and hoping the placenta will support the pregnancy after all. If you undergo amnio at about 16 weeks, there's the 1% risk of loss (big enough to steer me far far away from amnio; risk-averse does not begin to describe my approach to pregnancy). Waiting, waiting for the other shoe to drop. I think I exhaled at 24 weeks: viability.

So I appear to be pregnant, but I think it's going to be awhile before I can really believe that, say it out loud. By conincidence, I needed to buy more prenatal vitamins today; when asked if I wanted a box of 30 or a box of 100 I took the 30. What am I going to do with 100 prenats? Good lord, talk about tempting fate, I'll just take the smallest possible box, thanks. That's what I've been doing since FET #1. Just the thirty.

That's how I will come to believe in this pregnancy. One 30 tablet box of Elevit at a time.