Miracle - Part IX

Praise God from whom all blessings flow...



I have waited years to write this post, and it brings me great joy to tell you all that Mr. Wonderful and I are pregnant! Can you believe it?! What a miracle! PRAISE GOD! The reality is still sinking in, and I think it's only in the last couple of hours that I have allowed myself to rejoice and get excited! We are only a little over three weeks along, so things are very early and we definitely need your continued prayers for the safety and further development of our baby (or babies - time will tell).

It has been an emotional roller coaster of a week at our house. We have seen the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. Mostly we have just been confused. I write all this next stuff primarily to document the journey for ourselves, but I also know there are a few of you out there who love the details! So here goes...

The day after my embryo transfer procedure I scheduled my blood pregnancy test date for Thursday, May 22nd. (As I've mentioned before, we chose to keep this date private because we wanted to have time to process everything.) So last Thursday I went to the lab in the morning and had my blood drawn. The nurse called with the results that afternoon and said that the test came back positive but that my Hcg (the pregnancy hormone) was considered extremely low (it was 11; they were expecting it to be around 100). She told me this could mean one of three things: 1) we had a good pregnancy and my count had just not had the chance to rise yet, 2) that I was having an early miscarriage, or 3) an ectopic pregnancy. The nurse encouraged me to stay positive, but she also advised us to not tell a lot of people since everything was still very much up in the air. The nurse instructed me to come back in on Tuesday, May 27th for a retest. That evening we were pretty disappointed that the answer was not clear cut, but thankful that hope was still alive. And we were a little frustrated that we were going to have to wait another 5 days because of the Memorial Day holiday.

Beginning Friday things started to change. I apologize if this is too much information for some of you, but I started my period Friday afternoon/evening. As we headed into the weekend and nothing was changing with my body I was realizing that I was likely having a miscarriage. Colin and I even began the grieving process. There were many tears shed, lots of sleeping (I didn't really have motivation to do much of anything else), and more tears. We told our families what was going on. By the Lord's grace alone, around Monday afternoon/evening Colin and I began to slowly see glimmers of hope for our future family amidst our grief. We started to believe that God must have a child out there for us to adopt. We talked about how we'd start researching adoption agencies, etc. We even became a little excited about the possibility. On Monday night I spent 45 minutes writing a blog post to tell you all that we had a miscarriage (I intended to post it Tuesday afternoon following my retest).

On Tuesday I had my retest in the morning. I spent the day relaxing at home. I felt I already knew the results, so I really wasn't all that anxious. I got the phone call from the nurse in the early afternoon and to my complete shock she told me, "Your results look great!" My Hcg level had increased and my other counts looked good as well (my Hcg was 109; my nurse was expecting it to only be about 44 or so, if it even increased at all). She said that it was a good sign.

On Wednesday afternoon Colin and I went in to meet with our doctor. We told him about all that was going on with my body, and he basically said the blood counts were king. The rest did not really matter. He said it was not that uncommon for women to have a normal period the first month of their pregnancy. We were able to get a lot of our questions answered, and Colin and I walked away with some new hope.

I went in today for another blood retest. The doctor had told us during Wednesday's appointment that if the Hcg count plateaued or declined it would not be a good thing. We just wanted to see it continue to rise. My results came in this afternoon, and my Hcg had increased to 339! And we now feel much more comfortable telling the world that we are pregnant! We have a follow-up appointment with the doctor next week and hopefully we will learn some more then.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU for your continued love, support and prayers. It means so much to me that even though we had gone quiet on the blog, you all kept faithfully praying. What would our weekend have been like had we not been surrounded by your prayers? Thank you for believing and hoping and praying through it all!

Please take a moment to praise God with us for this precious miracle!