To test or not to test... we have a 5dpt squinter!

Today I am 6dpt (days past transfer).  Since 4dpt I've been feeling some familiar feelings - cramping, lower back pain, mild queasiness in the morning, headaches.  All of these I had around the same time with Kellen.  I usually don't get queasy, lower back pain, or headaches in a normal cycle - cramping sure...but this is a different type of cramping.  It's more of a stretching and pulling cramping rather than dull menstrual cramping.  On the other hand though, I have quit drinking my daily cup of coffee starting on my day of transfer.  Monday & Tuesday I was feeling soooo incredibly weird and out of it - clearly caffeine withdrawal - so my symptoms could've been associated with the lack of coffee.  But still, I wasn't convinced.  I still had the "I feel like I just did crunches" feeling too.

So anyway, I was getting ready for work yesterday feeling sorta sick and thinking "can it be?  Am I preggo?"  I have looked at the embryo timeline many times within the past couple days but that timeline assumes that the blast had not hatched yet.  Mine was already hatched which means it can implant within a couple hours of transfer.  So that shortens the timeline by 1-2 days.  I got a bfp with Kellen on 7dpt so finally after lots of back and forth, I said "I'm just gonna do it!".  I whipped out a first response early result and really had to try hard to get enough pee on it (I didn't quite think that part through - I have pee sticks but they need to be peed on to work, duh!).  You're supposed to hold it in your pee stream for 5 seconds - I could barely get 3 seconds and those seconds only consisted of dribbling.  Lol.  I was pot-commited at that point though and didn't wanna waste the test so I tried to get as much as I could.  I set the test aside and went on getting ready while periodically checking it.  At first I didn't see anything but then when the 3 minute waiting period came, I saw a super faint shadow of a line!  No WAY!  It definitely was a squinter - but at the same time, it definitely was a line!  Some tests with the infamous blue ink are known to give false positives with "evaporation lines" that look like a shadow of a second line, but really they're not.  First Responses though rarely do that.  That's why in the IVF world, FRERs are the gold standard.  Plus you can test super early with them!

Once I saw a line, it got darker and darker.  Naturally I then took about 1/2 hour taking pics with my phone in different lighting, at different angles, against different backgrounds.  I was a nut-job!  No matter what I did, the faint line I was seeing was REALLY faint in the pictures.  Below is one of the pics I took.

It is so hard to see - but it is there!  So then I had to finish getting ready while being a bit emotional and had to get my son ready for daycare.  Needless to say, I was late to work! 

Yesterday evening I got home, peed on a stick, confirmed it was still positive (it was slightly darker too) and wrapped it up for my hubby as a late Father's Day present.  He was shocked and elated when he opened it up:)  He didn't realize I would know so early.  The benefit of a frozen cycle is that, though incredibly boring at first, once the transfer happens, it is really fast.  Whereas in a fresh IVF cycle you have the stimming/monitoring phase, retrieval, 5 day wait for blast development, transfer, and then a 10 day wait for beta.  So since we did an FET, things have seemed to have moved faster than other IVF cycles we've had. 

I've also POASed 2 more times today as well.  Here is the progression of those tests: 

Now that we do have 2 lines, we are still cautious of course.  The embryo is chromosomally normal though so that is on our side and cuts are chances of a chemical or miscarriage down by a lot, but even so, there are still a multitude of things that could go wrong and the embryo still could just not be strong enough to progress to the stage where the heart develops.  We have jumped over yet another hump though.  I will continue to test daily until my beta on Monday morning.  Hopefully I'll have fairly strong lines by then, will have stronger symptoms, and won't have to be nervous at work waiting for the call.  The real test is the 2nd beta though as that test determines the doubling rate which is the main indicator of viability at this stage.  Fingers crossed very very hard!  Thankfully we have a busy weekend coming up so it will be easy to distract myself.

For now though, on this day, I am pregnant - 3 weeks 4 days to be exact (if the FET calculator I'm using is correct!).  If all progresses well, my due date will be March 5th:)!