The first of many acronyms we became familiar with while visiting online fertility forums is the TWW. So far, the process was a series of short doctor’s visits with a lot of waiting and hoping in the interim, but it was time to put that all behind us. This was the wait of all waits: the dreaded two week wait. After the transfer (or insemination for IUI patients) there is an eleven day window during which you can do absolutely nothing but wait to see if the process worked or not. Once you become pregnant, your body begins producing HCG hormones which are detected on home pregnancy tests. The hormone levels will begin to rapidly rise once the embryo implants into the wall of the uterus, and can take up to eleven days before it is detected on a blood test. The clinic we went to didn’t suggest using home pregnancy tests at all, and just instructed us to come in for the beta pregnancy test (blood work) after the eleven days. This would serve as either confirmation of pregnancy – or news that it was all for naught this time around.

As I’m sure comes across in this blog, A* and I are not much for waiting, and so we took things into our own hands after the transfer. Excitement for the whole process aside, we were getting up bright and early on day eleven and flying back to Canada before the clinic opened again after the weekend. We were hardly going to wait to get back to Canada, schedule an appointment with A*’s family doctor, go to a blood collection clinic and then wait a day or so for the results. No, we had enough waiting during this process and we just needed to come up with a better solution. Having forgotten our pre-purchased Costco pack of pregnancy tests at home, we skedaddled to the local Walmart and bought the entirety of their cheapest stock. God help any worried women needing assurances after a late visitor this month.

It should also come as no surprise that we had been researching early pregnancy test results after IVF. We learned that the trigger shot (done a week before the transfer, and just prior to the retrieval) will cause a false positive on a pregnancy test for HCG. If we were to take a pregnancy test right away and have it come back positive it would likely be the HCG from the trigger shot that the test had detected. These levels will drop below the detection threshold of a pregnancy test by two or three days post transfer, which happens before the embryo has yet implanted. So basically, we spent all this time and money and the first step will be us, hunched over a pregnancy test hoping for a negative result!

The online lingo of IVF and fertility forums seems like a language onto itself, but there’s a few more handy acronyms that come into play to help make sense of the TWW. We had a 5DT (five day transfer), meaning that the embryos were fertilized and grown in a Petri dish for five days post-retrieval and prior to the transfer back into A*’s uterus. A pregnancy test done 3DP5DT (three days post a five day transfer) will likely have allowed for the trigger shot to disappear out of her system and levels of HCG to fall below a home pregnancy test detection threshold. We already know that by 11DP5DT is the earliest ideal date for a blood pregnancy test, according to most clinics. Therefore; at some point between 3DP5DT and 11DP5DT the levels of HCG will become detectable in urine if the pregnancy is successful. With our borderline obsessive number of pregnancy tests, we opted to conduct our own N=1 experiment to determine if we were pregnant before ever getting back to Canada on day eleven.

Even though it’s now two months later, we can both recall our remaining days in Mexico vividly. They were full of anticipation, gatherings in bathrooms, and so many bodily fluids! The TWW is no joke. It’s hard on a person, hard on a couple, and comes with a lot of emotions that you can never really prepare for. The friends and family we had been sharing the process with thus far had similar feelings too. Because of all of this, and more, we decided to put the blog updates on hold at the time. We needed to process, first and foremost, before we were ready to share. Two months later and we still haven’t been fully processed everything, but we’re ready to accept and move on to the next step. Keep reading, I promise you the wait has been harder on us.