Lessons Learned While Trying to Have a Baby: Pregnancy Test Results

“And now, I ask, what great blessings has he bestowed upon us? Can ye tell?” (Alma 26:2)

The two weeks between the embryo transfer and our pregnancy test were some of the longest of my life. We were hoping for the best but in the back of our minds expecting the worst. I didn't want to get me hopes up.

When two weeks had (finally) past, we went to our clinic for a blood pregnancy test. Due to the types and amount of drugs you have in your system from IVF you need to have three separate blood pregnancy tests performed to insure you are pregnant and not just “drugged up.”

While signing in at our clinic we were told they had just gotten a new computer system that morning. We didn’t think much of this and completed our blood test and went home. We were told our results would be sent to our IVF clinic and they would be in-touch with us around four that afternoon.

By four-thirty we still hadn’t received a call. I called our IVF nurse but she had already left for the day. David called the on-call nurse at our clinic to see if they could tell us our results. Both of us couldn’t believe it when we learned that, because of the new computer system installed that morning, our results had been lost and we would need to wait until the morning to find out if we were pregnant or not. Oh no, you did not just tell me you lost my pregnancy test results! I could have screamed…ok, so I did scream. I was so entirely frustrated.

Finally, our IVF nurse called us back and told us to go ahead and take an at-home pregnancy test just so we didn’t go crazy. We knew the results wouldn’t be definitive but she told us they would give us some indication (i.e. if the test was negative we almost certainly were not pregnant).

I went upstairs and took a pregnancy test just waiting for only one line to show up. And then there were two lines. I couldn’t believe it. I slowly walked downstairs and told David the test was positive. We both broke down sobbing. We held each other for a long time and I remember whispering repeatedly, “Please let this be real, please let this be real.” We cried and we laughed and we called our parents to let them know. The next day we received the news that, yes, our blood pregnancy test had come back as a definite positive. We were pregnant.

“And now, I ask, what great blessings has he bestowed upon us? Can ye tell?” (Alma 26:2)

I included the song below because of the last verse. It reminds me so much of the night we found out we were pregnant.