After having the shittiest day of anxiety yesterday, it turns out my beta levels are fine. They were 352 today at 16 dpo. I spent the day googling things like “hpt getting fainter”, etc. Let me assure you that there is a wide oeuvre of such posts in forums around the internets. They seem about evenly split between “this happened to me and here’s my 2-yr old, proving nothing was wrong” and “this happened to me and I miscarried”.
I always figured that the warning that hpts aren’t quantitative was about as reliable as the warning that hpts don’t work before your period is due. That is to say, largely untrue. Sure, there can be some quality control issues, especially since the internet cheapies I use are 20 cents a pop, but I figured that the margin of error was reasonably small. The line I got at 15 dpo looked just like the line I got at 12 dpo and way lighter than 13 dpo, so I figured that it was over.
I think that between my first pregnancy that ended at 16 weeks, and DH’s cancer, I now immediately jump to the conclusion that the worst will happen. I did plenty of magical thinking in both those cases, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that things were really really wrong. I guess it feels at this point like hope is for suckers. My case manager from my RE’s office called today I told her I already knew it was bad news, and told her why, and she started laughing at me (in a nice way) and told me my levels were great.
In other great news, I get to stop taking the estrace, which is nasty both because I end up with blue gunk in my lady bits, and also because I suspect it’s also giving me terrible insomnia.
Anyway, internets, let me add my story to the list of those where the darkness of the line on the hpt bore no relationship to the beta level.
Are we there yet? 