Sunday, August 21, 2016

Spotting and Symptom Spotting

I woke up this morning to soiled underwear and pink spotting on the toilet paper. Then I made the grave mistake of googling "miscarriage while on progesterone". I do not recommend this under any circumstances! Forum after forum, story after story of miscarriages.

I have to wait until Tuesday to get my first beta, a full 2 weeks after the transfer. These seems excessively long given that the transfer was equivalently five days after "ovulation". I cope with this by reminding myself that I would rather wait to see a higher a number then a much lower number and fret over what this means. As in, I would rather know that I am not pregnant and likely never was then to know that I was pregnant at 4 weeks 1 days but not by 4 weeks 5 days. But then spotting has occurred so this argument doesn't really stand up.

I also tell myself that if I tested early and it were negative that I would lose all motivation to continue the progesterone shots. These are not the most enjoyable way to begin my morning. Neither is spotting.

Clearly I'm stuck on the spotting. And now extremely eager to get to Tuesday. Last pregnancy there was never any spotting or really anything out of the ordinary in the beginning. The worst was when I had a period of cramping between the period of being released from the RE to my first OB appointment, which put me into a tizzy for a few hours, until I realized it was simply constipation pains that resolved itself with a trip to the bathroom.

I am reminding myself that approximately 30% of pregnancies have early spotting. I may to repeat this every 5 minutes, but at least it is something. As long as the spotting doesn't get worse, I will keep from panicking.

In other news, I was planning to write a post on "symptom spotting". I need to preface this by saying that I completely understand that pregnancy symptoms and progesterone symptoms are largely the same. I do not put much stock in these, especially after the one cycle where I had so many convincing symptoms that turned out to be nothing, but for posterity sake, here goes. These are the symptoms I have noticed over the past 1-2 weeks:

  • Slightly increased fatigue, but this is very subjective and not nearly to the level that I remember at certain points of my last pregnancy. 
  • Slightly more sensitive nipples. 
  • Definitely a small increase in breast size and a feeling of fullness. 
  • Occasional "twinges" in my pelvic region. It feels like a muscle or tendon is pulled. If I stretch in a particular way then the feeling can be downright severe and painful, but most often it is just a nagging sensation. 
  • Spotting. (Does this count as a potential symptom? Ugh.)

Two more days and then hopefully there will be answers. Two more days.


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