sleepless – check. crazy – check.

We have reached the final stretch of the 2WW. I hate this bit. I stop being able to sleep in. I wake up to take my temperature (or sometimes hours before I am supposed to take my temperature) and can’t fall back to sleep because I JUST. CANNOT. WAIT. to input my temp into Fertility Fiend and see that cute little graph do its thing.

It is a ridiculous thing. I am, at this point, either pregnant or not pregnant.
My temperature – high, low, indifferent – does not indicate crap at this point.

Still… I cannot sleep after I take it.

And I can’t not take it. I have never achieved that level of brilliance.

I decided to follow the example of all obsessors before me and pee on a stick during this period of no-point-in-testing. To try to explain to the novices… I took a shot of HCG (human chorionic gonadatropin – how’s THAT for a fun name?) 6 days after I ovulated. My doctor (and apparently numerous hip docs in Europe and elsewhere) thinks this could help me keep any potential babies in… help them dig into the uterus, basically. BUT… pregnancy tests are looking for HCG – it’s the stuff that embryos start emitting that lets us know they’re in there. Therefore, any pregnancy test I take will currently be positive even if I am not pregnant since I shot myself in the stomach with the stuff on Thursday and it takes 6-12 days for it to leave your system.

So I am testing to watch the HCG leave my system. Just for kicks. This way I will know what a positive looks like. And that will make my glaringly white negative tests all the more convincing. I tested yesterday and today and got bright, lovely, positive tests both days. No change at all.

Here’s my question, fellow fertility nuts…
Some sources online say it can take 12-14 days for HCG to leave your system. Is this true?
It can continue to show up in pee tests?
So why wouldn’t it pop up in a beta, too? Is blood different somehow?

I have started to convince myself that this is what is going to happen:
Maybe my doctor is not hip and cutting-edge. Maybe she is just dumb. And so I took a shot of HCG at 6 dpo and then I will have a beta 14 dpo and it will be positive and the lovely receptionist will tell me the news and there will be cheering. And then I’ll have a second beta and it will be lower because I wasn’t pregnant in the first place. And then a week later I will have a 0 beta and it will all have been one sick joke.

I know. I know. I need to trust my doctor just a tad. An iota.

But can someone explain to me why HCG would stick around in urine so long but not in the blood? Just to quell the rising panic just a tad? An iota?

FOLLOW-UP: One source says HCG levels fall by half every 36 hours. That 12 days to leave the system stuff referred to much higher dosages than mine. My shots were, I think, 250 units. Therefore, it should be lower than 5 by the time I have the beta. I should see a negative test the morning of the beta, basically. Right now, it’s only been 65 hours. So there’s still a ton of the stuff in there. Thus the equally bright tests. OK. Much better. Why do I bother to gripe before I do research?