So Far, So Good; or, Second Betas

So first of all, the most important news: second betas are in at 686 at 18 dpIUI. That's a tripling time of 72 hours. Not bad!

It was a rocky day getting to that point. I woke up around 3 am this morning to pee, tossed and turned for an hour after returning to bed, woke up again at 7 (to pee again), and had to get ready and get Bella to her doggy daycare so I could get to the RE's and spend the day in the city. After the blood draw, I went down to the library and tried to study--and I did manage to work for an hour or so. But I couldn't resist the lure of Dr. Google and he led me straight into the center of a panic attack. The tech who had drawn my blood had said I'd get the beta call between 2 and 6 pm. The closer we got to two o'clock, the tighter the knot in my stomach grew and the less I could breathe. I felt my heart racing when I pressed my hand to my chest and I could barely keep from crying. I was just so sure the PA would give me terrible news when she made the call, and I was losing my mind a bit from worry.

The office still hadn't called by the time I had to get to my therapy appointment (around the corner from my school) at 3:30, so I silenced my phone and went to the session. As soon as I told my therapist I was pregnant, I burst into tears. I then cried pretty constantly throughout the session. I told her all my fears: how this is going to end just like my first pregnancy did; how I'm obsessively imagining every potential future negative moment in this pregnancy and every past one with the m&m; how I can't imagine what the cells inside me are like because every time I try to picture them (as I did with the m&m) I think, "It's probably dead already, so what's the point."

(PS: I just read that last paragraph and realized that, the few times I've talked about this so far, I keep saying "I was pregnant" not "I am pregnant." Like, "On Friday, I found out I was pregnant." Gotta love amateur psychology).

Anyway, my therapist was great, as always. I am so glad I switched to her almost a year ago. I feel like our sessions together have made a profound difference in the way I cope with stress, not that you can tell from the way I've been acting lately. She said it was completely understandable why I would feel this way, but that I am making things emotionally worse for myself with my need to control the situation. I tend to need control to feel confident and not anxious, so in my anxiety about the uncertainty of this pregnancy, I'm seizing onto all my memories of the last one in order to convince myself that I know what's going to happen. And in the process, I'm mentally torturing myself into a bloody stump of a human being (my words, not hers).

Anyway, she proffered the radical idea at the end of the session that I assume for the time being that this is all going to work out. I'm not there yet. But I'm going to try to get there.

I had planned to wait until I got home to listen to the clinic's voice mail with Lawyer Guy, but in my new-found, post-therapy calm, I decided to just do it myself right there. Again, I limited expectations. I told myself that as long as the number didn't go down, I'd be okay with it. And then again it exceeded my wildest dreams! I never thought we'd get to 500, let alone almost 200 points above that!

I'm happy right now. That rush of relief after a good result is so wonderful and addictive. I'm not ready to read any more into this result than being happy that things are okay right now. But that's a lot better than I felt six hours ago.