7dp5dt

More torture.  When I got home from work yesterday, the test I did in the morning had faded so much it was very obviously fainter than the previous day's test.  So I despaired again, until I realized that the horizontal line had faded right along with the test line, so I tried to tell myself it was a dye issue.  And I was somewhat successful in that.  I also repeated Gabby's comments to myself like a mantra (thanks Gabby!) that I could be going from a beta of 10 to 15 or something like that, and still be OK.  And those betas are pretty damn hard for tests to pick up so I shouldn't be surprised if it's hard to see any difference in color.

I just wish I was one of those blissfully ignorant women who see a line and are immediately planning the nursery.  But of course infertility has ruined all that for me.  For all of us, really. And besides, those blissfully ignorant women are usually testing after their periods are already late, so they get nice thick dark lines to start out.  I should stop comparing myself and wishing that I was somebody else.  This is who I am, fragile, battered and on many occasions, hopeless.   But beta day is Friday, so I will know by then.  This particular torture will be over, and it will be on to other tortures.

And I mustn't forget that after last cycle I promised myself that I wouldn't use HPTs, that I'd wait until beta.  And then I decided that if the faint tests I have are the only evidence of a chemical pregnancy, then I'd rather see them and mourn my pregnancy than be in ignorance.  I don't know if that makes sense to anyone other than me, but I've had two documented chemicals and two other cycles where the HPTs also gave me faint positives that had already faded by beta time.  And as my clinic doesn't give a beta value below 5, I got negative betas and no indication of anything.  So were those two also chemical pregnancies or test malfunctions? I'll never know, of course, but if at the end of this process I never end up with a child, at least I can look back on potentially 4 chemical pregnancies and think of my plucky little embryos that tried hard.

OK, on to the tests.  Sorry I didn't explain them before.  These are +/- tests.  The control line is on the right, and the test is on the left.  If positive, it should show a nice "+" and if negative it should show a "-".  So the horizontal line is always there, and we're looking for a vertical line bisecting it to form the plus sign.   And I've taken the little test strips out of the cartridges because a) they dry quicker that way and b) they are easier to photograph.

The good news is that I'm getting identifiable lines quicker.  On Sunday it really didn't appear in the form of a line until about an hour after I peed on it - prior to that it was more a fuzzy accumulation of dye clustered around the place where the line would be.  Yesterday, I had an identifiable line within about 3 minutes.  Today it was within about 3 seconds.   So that's all good.  I just wish I had a nice dark line so that I could reassure myself.  I know, I know, always wanting what I can't have!

This is test 1 (Sunday, or 5dp5dt) at the top vs. test 3 (today, or 7dp5dt) at the bottom.  I think today's is darker!