It's only Wednesday

Shit, it's been a long week.  In 24 hours we'll have a baby update and I'm feeling kinda sick about it.  More nervous about tomorrow than I was last week.

I've decided that the sickness I experienced between 5 1/2 and 6 1/2 weeks is just not coming back.  It's not gone completely, it's just been replaced with a more nagging type of all day manageable nausea.  The type of nausea that actually is lessened by eating smaller meals at closer together intervals and is completely tolerable.  I feel like 7 weeks is WAY too early for my sickness to have improved, but 1) there is obviously nothing I can do about it and 2) I'm trying to find some comfort in the fact that I am still sick.

With the pregnancies that I lost, I specifically said to my husband on more than one occasion - I just don't feel pregnant.  I mean I really and truly felt like my normal regular self without a period.  That is definitely not the case now.  And if I hadn't had the extreme sickness I had last week, I'd honestly be pretty happy with my symptoms right now.

But the minds games are KILLING me.  This is harder than I ever imagined it would be.  Then I remind myself that my regular practice probably won't do another ultrasound until the NT scan and that's still over 4 weeks away . . . and then the anxiety really sets in.  I am going to try to convince them that I might die if I have to wait 4 weeks for another ultrasound.

What we hope to see tomorrow:

1) An embryo that has grown appropriately in the last week.  They are measuring millimeters in my uterus through a transvaginal ultrasound, and each millimeter makes the difference in each gestational day here . . . so if you give a small fudge factor for measuring inconsistencies, the embryo doesn't have to measure EXACTLY 7w3d tomorrow (it measured 6w3d last week), but it should be darn close.

2) A heartbeat with a rate that has accelerated.  The heart technically starts beating sometime early in the 5th week (although much too small to be detected via ultrasound) and starts out beating around 80bpm.  The fetal heart rate should increase by approximately 3bpm per day up until sometime around the 9th week, when it will stabilize and then slow down a bit for the remainder of pregnancy.  These are all approximate guidelines and timeframes, so there is no magical number we are shooting for, but faster than 121bpm is certainly what we are hoping for tomorrow.

3) HCG that has increased.  As I mentioned last week, doubling times once betas get this high can really slow down a lot and bloodwork is not the best indicator of pregnancy outcome at this point.  But my HCG should still be increasing and not by an insignificant amount.  Just like the heartbeat, there is no magic number here, but higher is better.