MicroblogMondays: Great Beta Levels

It’s been interesting to support my cousin alongside her on her fertility journey.  Although she has been trying for more than a couple of years, she hardly ever reads any blogs or joins any online groups.  In those 5.5 year of trying to become parents, I was on many online forums, joined many FB groups, and was a regular reader of many many blogs.  Because of that, I feel that I have a lot more knowledge regarding things like the IVF process.  Many of the questions that she has asked me are ones to which she’d know the answers if she had been following infertility blogs.  I am happy to answer them.  It is just interesting to see the differences in our approaches dealing with our fertility issues.  And now that she is pregnant, it feels even more obvious that she doesn’t know much.  Every time she gets her beta results, she’d ask me if they numbers are good.  I have to reassure her that the numbers have been beyond good.  Here is the lowdown:

Initial beta on 7dp5dt: 80

Second beta on 10dp5dt: 577

Third beta on 16dp5dt: 5582

Those are crazy numbers, aren’t they?  When I saw that her second beta was over 500, I couldn’t help but wonder if the embryo had split.  This value was even higher than Annie’s second beta of 464 on 10dp5dt, and Annie was carrying twins for us.  Dr. E, my RE, said that there is a 1% chance that the embryo would split, so it could still be one very strong embryo.  One day my cousin was scaring me though.  She messaged me to ask if she should do an injection of progesterone in oil that evening.  It was already 11pm her time.  She was supposed to insert one progesterone suppository in the morning and two in the evening.  She only had one left in the evening.  A shipment was supposed to arrive that day but didn’t get delivered on time, so she ran out of the suppositories.  She still had PIO at home from previous cycles so she asked if she should inject some.  I asked Dr. E who answered me right away (you got to love her for her fast response).  Dr. E said that missing one dose of progesterone could cost her pregnancy, and urged her to inject the PIO right away.  My cousin did.  Then she told me that she wasn’t too worried about not receiving the shipment since she still had PIO at home.  It was just that the suppositories were not covered by insurance and would cost $1100, so she asked around and someone was willing to order some for her and ship them to her.  Of course the shipment was messed up.  And now knowing that skipping a dose could cost her pregnancy, saving that $1100 doesn’t sound like it’s worth it at all.  I just told her to always have progesterone around until her placenta takes over.

It does look like her pregnancy is going well.  I can’t wait to see how many babies they see on her first ultrasound!