Aaaaaannd…. back to the Mothership Hospital this lunch-time, for a third HCG blood test.
H and I are developing a bad habit of linking arms and humming Chopin’s Funeral March (which has unnerving tendency of morphing into the Imperial March from Star Wars) when walking from the car-park to the hospital. Apologies to all passers-by we have unnerved so far.
This one was being done on the Acute Gynae ward (ooh, ooh, been there!), as it is a Sunday and the EPU itself doesn’t really function on Sundays (though there are on-call doctors lurking about in case of emergencies). We walked in to find the place nearly deserted and with most of the lights switched off, which added a tenebrous melancholy to the proceedings.
The nurses at the reception desk were utterly charming (GOD how I love the staff at Mothership). After writing my name and date of birth down for them so they could fight the good fight with the notoriously unweildy new computer system, we were directed to some random chairs in a twilit corridor. Surpressed desperate urge to hum the Imperial March from Star Wars again.
The nurse came bustling along, flicking light-switches as she came, with the kit for taking a blood sample. She remarked on my very teutonic surname, and spoke to us in German, and was highly tickled when I had to confess I speak four words of it myself. Hers was excellent. She then tutted over the ‘spoiled’ veins in the back of my hand and the crook of my left arm. There is a good vein in the right elbow-crook, so I showed it to her, and, you know, the tiny needle they use to collect one vial is far more comfortable than the horking great thing they use to establish a drip and collect four vials, so the fact that so far this puncture is far less of a mess than the others may be not as much to do with her fabulous technique as she would like to assume. However, she wouldn’t let us go home until I’d sat pressing down hard on my puncture with my elbow bent and my right hand in the air for a good five or six minutes. I think she realised I was a bleeder when she thought she’d put the needle in awry (so much for technique) and yet I was still happily filling the syringe in double-quick time. Ahh, my enthusiastically runny blood. Is it, or is it not, an issue? When shall we ever know?
And then we checked they had our contact details, and went home again.
Cue incredibly tedious couple of hours, in which I lay on the bed ostensibly writing short stories but in reality googling beta levels at 12dpo, and in which H fretted and cleaned the kitchen and fretted some more (he is fretting more than I am. My poor darling, I’ve broken his stiff upper lip in three places).
Phone finally rings at about 4 o’clock. In 48 hours, my beta has gone from 37 to 64.
Oh God.
Best guess, as cycle was so immensely weird, I’m 12 dpo today.
Oh God.
Also, I haven’t had any more bleeding since yesterday (and it was definitely tapering off yesterday), and no bad pain or cramps since New Year’s Day (when they were also tapering off). Twinges, yes, but nothing scary.
Oh God oh God oh God.
And my mother is coming for dinner.
Nuts in May 