Chillin like a villian

First, thank you all for your wonderfully enthusiastic responses to the last post, It made me feel very, very good to see that level of enthusiasm and goodwill. I'm going to be going back and reading those for a while to come.

I have not gone in for any bloodwork yet. This is more out of sheer laziness (over the weekend, my only option is to show up between 7 and 9 am at my RE's clinic) and a lovely, lovely lack of fear that something is wrong  right at this moment.  I have symptoms of both high estrogen (in the CM) and high progesterone. My betas, by HPT are clearly rising (see picture). I think I can safely say, based on visual evidence, that it is doubling over a 48 hour period.

The main reason I'm going in for a  blood test now is to get the progesterone numbers, I'm really curious as to what they would be at, and to determine if I need additional supplementation. My first pregnancy ended around 2-3 weeks after I weaned myself off supplemental progesterone at around 7 weeks. I don;t think its because of that, because my blood levels  without supplementation were nice and high at around 40, but you never know. Incidentally, I was only put on progesterone because after getting my positive beta, my BBTs began falling to around pre-ovulatory values and stayed there, it had scared the crap out of me.  In retrospect, I maybe thought it was because of thyroid insufficiency. My second pregnancy, I was not on supplemental progesterone, and the development was going beautifully, right on track, till the heartbeat just stopped. And that can be attributed to the Turners (Monosomy 45 XO) with around 90 % probability.

My last pregnancies were conceived in cycle patterns with a luteal phase defect (11 days)- now my LP is almost always 15 days. One of the questions I continue to scratch my head about- what determines length of LP? Is it just the amount of progesterone being produced? Or is it dependent on the progesterone receptor and/or downstream pathways triggered by progesterone in the maintenance of the endometrium? In my last pregnancies, my progesterone  was always high enough (over 40 ng/ml), but this was a pregnant cycle, and your progesterone production is bolstered by the HCG in your system, its a positive feedback mechanism.

Now, I wonder if the progesterone would be higher in this pregnancy (than around 40 ng/ml). Time permitting, I'll go in for the test tomorrow afternoon.  I'll also be looking at TSH, T3, T4, estrogen, Beta levels. I'm also going to try to convince somebody to throw in a toxoplasmosis IgG/ IgM test. I have a cat, and though she is exclusively indoor, I'm still the one scooping out her poop.

Science aide, its wonderful that I'm not scared. If you had to ask me to come up with one adjective to describe how I feel about this pregnancy, its 'numb'. I'm overjoyed that I am pregnant, I think I have not left any bases uncovered, but I cannot bring myself to think that I'm getting a baby at the the end of this. I'm not saying I think I won't, its just that my brain (and my heart) is refusing to go there and imagine it. I'm like, it it goes well, great. If it doesn't, we'll figure out why to the best of our abilities, and probably move to IVF with PGD as a next step. And I think, all said and done, that is a very sensible place to be. I'm just glad my emotional side is allowing it, for now.  And its funny, despite this equanimity, I still talk to my uterus, making my developing baby the most extravagant promises if he/she decides to stick around. Yeah, I'm already bribing my unborn child.