Taking the Test

The 'Two Week Wait' is a torturous time between your embryo transfer and the date you've been given to test on. Different clinics ask people to test on different days, some ask people not to test at all and instead have them go to the hospital for a blood test.

Even between my four transfers I've been given a range of different days to test on, from nine or ten days post transfer right the way up to 12 or 14 days after. Of course this time was the longest I've had to wait.

When an embryo implants it takes a little while for the hCG to build up in your system to be at a high enough level to be detected by a pregnancy test. This starts to be produced around day five or six after transfer but isn't really measurable until day nine, which is the first day you could expect to get a result on a pregnancy test.

With this in mind I carefully calculated that June 3rd would be the earliest I could possibly get a positive test. I'd planned to test early mainly because my official test day was a Thursday and I didn't like the idea of getting the result and then having to go to work straight afterwards, particularly if it wasn't a good result.

The Saturday seemed like the best day to do it, since we would have the whole weekend to come to terms with the result. It was also early enough not to completely ruin my hopes if it was a negative, it might have just been a little too early for it to show up, but by the same token it would help to cushion the devastating blow the following Thursday.

Mr Click and I discussed it. At first he wasn't keen on me testing early, but then he came around to my way of thinking and agreed that testing on Saturday seemed like a good idea.

On the Thursday before I was all for testing but then the following day I felt completely zen about the whole thing. I wonder if this was a little like the overwhelming feeling of 'I'm pregnant' that I got with Olaf and Elsa at about the same point. I sort of felt like I didn't need to test, I could wait until the following Thursday, it was all good.

But then I woke up at 3am on Saturday. Now, if you're not familiar with pregnancy tests, you need to hold your pee for a while before you take the test. They recommend about four or five years to allow the hCG to build up. I worked out that if I was going to take the test, it would have to be then, there'd be no way I could hold on until 7/8am later that morning.

So I dragged myself out of bed. Peed in a little container for the purpose, dipped the test, turned it over and waited three minutes.

And this is what I saw:

That was taken virtually as soon as I'd turned it over and it was a total squinter. The camera wouldn't even focus on it properly unless I stuck my ring on the thing to give it something to focus on.

But it was all I needed to give me a little hope, so I kept watching and after about five minutes it looked like this:

Bear in mind that these photos were taken in awful lighting in the bathroom at some unholy time of the morning. In daylight you could see the line without even squinting:

I think that was when I truly believed that we might just have done it.