The most common kind of email I get from readers who stumble across this blog is from those who want to compare low beta experiences. Sometimes they' re looking for a magic bullet--something they can do to make that hCG number magically climb into the normal range--but mostly they're just looking to commiserate.
Because low betas suck. They suck so much. It's an extra cruel twist of the infertile knife, which was plenty sharp to begin with. Are you pregnant? Are you not pregnant? Were you briefly pregnant, but now not so much? Were the embryos just rattling around in your teflon coated uterus for awhile before finding a place to implant and start producing that lovely, lovely hCG?
Who knows? Nobody knows. The nurse who calls to give you the results doesn't know. Maybe she's new and has been told that anything over a 5 is positive so she says congratulations even though you know, courtesy of the internets, that it should be at least 50. The doctor doesn't know, when you talk to him to double check what the nurse has said. "Anything can happen," he says, but he's grim when he tells you to come back in two days for another blood test.
And what do you do during those two days? What do you tell the people who knew that you were cycling when they ask, "Well....what's the news?" How do you explain that you don't know? That even though you've spent $12,000 at this leading edge clinic where even Celine Dion went to get pregnant, nobody can tell you anything for sure. "You can't be a little pregnant," those friends might say, trying to make a joke, but of course you know that you can, that you are, and that maybe being a little pregnant is worse than not being pregnant at all.
But what makes it worse is the same thing that keeps you going. You still have hope--hope that this will end differently than it did last time, that the next blood test will be better, that the first ultrasound will find something no one expected to see.
What you can't bring yourself to consider, though, is that a year from now, you'll still be brought to tears remembering that phone call from the clinic, but you won't have time to sit down and have a good cry because you're too busy taking care of this.