So today was day 14 and that meant pregnancy test date...we should either have a period or an embryo today. It's a big day!
Back up a day or two...so we pondered taking a test early to just "see" if we were pregnant. We did a little Internet research (sometimes the worse enemy is knowing too much, I might add) to see if the shots Heidi got, courtesy of my very skilled injection talents, would affect the test. Bad news there...the very thing we injected her with was the hormone the pregnancy test measures. So, theoretically, we could get a false positive if we tested too early because she may still have residual HCG in her system. So we pondered. And validated. And pondered. And wrestled. And...well, you get the point.
So, at approximately 4:07 a.m. on Saturday morning, Heidi had to pee. Since she wanted to test using her first morning urine, this was the time she chose to take the dead rabbit test.
What? Dead rabbit? What are you talking about, anyone under age thirty might be asking? Around 1927 it was discovered that if you injected the urine of a pregnant woman into a rabbit, there would be corpora hemorrhagica in the ovaries of the rabbit. These bulging masses on the ovaries could not be seen with out killing the rabbit to inspect the ovaries, so invariably, every rabbit died, even if the woman wasn't pregnant. The phrase, "The rabbit died," came to be a euphemism for a positive pregnancy test after the late 1920 and early 1930s. Yes, I actually had to look up this explanation to give to Heidi, hence, the "anyone under thirty" disclaimer. Anyway...
At approximately 4:10 a.m., at Heidi's urging, I got out of bed and found out that unfortunately, the rabbit had survived. Well, you say, you took it early...perhaps too early.
It was, to say the least, a very difficult weekend. It's amazing how one KNOWS that there is a small chance this will work on try #1. You are fully aware that statistically speaking, you only have a 10% to 20% chance of having this work the first time. Why should we expect that Heidi's uterus and several million strange sperm would play nice on their first encounter? (I imagine her body reacted with a stern "What the hell is that??? Hide the egg, it's going for the egg, HIDE THE EGG!!!) We knew that there was the issue with the infection in her stomach, or in her uterus, wherever it chose to infect. We knew all this, yet we still hoped. We hoped we would be the exception. We thought we would be in that 10% to 20%...I mean, those statistics have to be someone, why not us?!? Heidi learned first hand how hard it was to miss someone or something you had not yet created, but to miss the possibility of that someone. And it was hard for her. And when her heart hurts, mine hurts right along side.
So, we still had a shred of hope. Maybe we did test too early. Maybe the test on Monday would be different. It took all weekend, but Heidi had finally accepted the possibility and was ready for the result, no matter what it was. Either way, the hope was much more contained and not wholly optimistic.
This morning at approximately 6:30 a.m., the rabbit survived again. Damn rabbit.
