If you've read the blog through previous generations of potential pregnancies, you'll know that Heather has no wherewithal when it comes to observing the official timeline. Nine days is too early to test. Wait for your period or two full weeks. Patience is not my beloved's strong suit, and I don't believe she has ever made it two weeks for a pregnancy test.
This has been an ongoing back-and-forth between us, as I beg for two weeks of hope before facing results-which, so far, have only been negative. I don't want to hear bad news any sooner than I have to, especially when the bad news doesn't even count. After a week, you're definitely going to get a negative, so why do you want to do that to yourself?
But this is the same woman who would like to open her Christmas gifts a week early, forgoing the ritual I treasure. And it's in the same spirit of ceremony that I want to sit down in her office with the door shut to listen to our voicemail Friday afternoon, instead of squinting at (imagined) pink lines on a pee strip for days beforehand.
The most ridiculous element of the whole thing is that we were warned specifically at our IVF class not to bother with home pregnancy tests because they could be influenced by the remaining traces of hcg from the Ovidrel trigger shots we administered just before egg retrieval. As of today, that was 13 days ago exactly. Sunday night, Heather, overcome by desire to both learn the secrets of her uterus and, I suspect, make some use of the dozens of pregnancy tests living in our bathroom closet, snatched up her iPad to dispute my warnings.
"Listen! This lady did her test only ten days after the trigger shot. They say it only stays in your system ten to fourteen days."
"Well," I said, "it's not fourteen days till tomorrow, and there's no point having a half-answer-or a bad answer-when we'll get an official result on Friday."
This did not register at all.
"Okay, this lady says that she did her test after ten days, though, and she got a pale pink line. You just have to watch and see if it gets darker."
"Heather, the nurse in the IVF class said that you'd just be kidding yourself to test in advance."
"Yeah, but this lady says that it's about a week if you get a 250iu shot, ten days with 500, and fourteen with 1000. What did we do?"
"Hell if I know, babe. They were pre-filled syringes and I just put 'em in like they said. There were two, though, so it must have been at least 500iu."
"Why don't you know? How do you find out?"
Overcome with the adrenaline of baby-making research and rebellion against my ideas, Heather hopped out of bed. I began to drift off. I think at some point she came back and tried to tell me something else, eventually giving up when all my responses were "Dude, you're supposed to wait. Stop it." And I'm pretty sure she tried to fall asleep, then left again. I can tell you that, when I got up Monday morning, records from MetroDrugs were strewn across the countertops.
Maybe, she told me later, she could take the tests every day and see if they got darker. I expressed disapproval, but I'm not sure she heard me.
Today we're supposed to get our toes done between naps. Wednesday night Heather has dinner out with friends. Thursday night, we're going to see a movie. By my estimates, that will kill about six hours of the seventy between now and the voicemail. Thank god for the Olympics.
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