Still Incubating (7w0d)

Every time I start to think things are settling down, I wind up seeing a pinkish color that is closer to red than I am comfortable with. After a while, things turn back to brown, and the cycle seems to start over. So hopefully things won't change in a drastically negative way after I post this update...

We had ultrasound #3 yesterday morning. Thankfully, I have not passed any other large clots since Monday night, and the last truly, definitively, without-question-it's-bright-red-blood incident was Wednesday morning. So I knew the gestational sac was still in there, and I was hopeful there was still a heartbeat.

There was, and it's speeding up appropriately - 135 bpm. Growth is exactly on track, measuring 6w6d, which is what yesterday was.

It's amazing how much an embryo changes in such a short period of time. There was less than 94 hours between ultrasound #1 and ultrasound #3. At #1, the baby was measuring 0.66 cm and looked like an ever-so-slightly curved line attached to a circle (the yolk sac). By yesterday, it was 0.87 cm, it was obvious which end was the head and which end was the rump, and the ultrasound tech said she could see the brain beginning to form. Incredible.

That is one of the silver linings of all the infertility/pregnancy drama we have to endure - we get a view of our Kiddo's in utero development that few people ever get to experience. It is so amazing to witness it.

The gestational sac looked a bit better, too. Still not as perfectly shaped as I'd like to be comfortable, but not nearly as squished by the hematoma as it looked on Tuesday. The tech who did our ultrasound yesterday was the one who had done most of our ultrasounds with Miss A. She hadn't done the first two this week, but she said she looked at my images from Tuesday before calling us into her room, and she was very happy about the way the sac looked compared to Tuesday. She couldn't see much fluid in the sac on Tuesday, and that had concerned her.

To me, the hematoma still looked about the same size as it did on Tuesday, but R said he thought it looked smaller, and when the tech measured it, she said it had shrunk considerably, from 16 ml to 5 ml. (She measured the width and height, but gave me the volume measurement. I'm not sure why. The tech on Tuesday did the same thing.

Based on how that scan went, we decided to go ahead and do the next round of IVIG. It's scheduled for Monday at 4 p.m., and the next ultrasound is scheduled for the next morning, on Christmas Eve.

For now, we are just continuing to take things one day at a time, and I am trying to stay off my feet as much as possible. Today, I've been feeling some low-grade nausea all day, along with a slight sensitivity to smells. My progesterone and estrogen meds have not been increased, so I am hoping that is a sign that my body is starting to kick in with its own contribution of hormones. Whatever the reason, nausea always makes me so happy. (Especially low-grade, but I'd even be thrilled with the lay-in-front-of-the-toilet-all-day variety.)

R laughs when I get so excited about it, but what can I say? I love every moment that I feel pregnant. And since we can't exactly afford our own personal in-home ultrasound machine so that I can see visible proof of the pregnancy at all times, I'll gladly take nausea as some form of reassurance.