In some other normal world, somewhere, there are women who have a sneaking suspicion they may be pregnant, pee on a stick, get a positive result and then schedule a 6-week appointment with their OB. And that’s that.

I used to live in that world. But in the last two years I’ve been transported to another world entirely. To a place where you could be pregnant one hour and not the next. Where every single cramp and twinge must be analyzed, fretted over and stressed about. And a pregnancy isn’t really a pregnancy until multiple doubling HCG tests say it is. And even then…don’t count on it.

I went in for my first beta Thursday morning. And, just 1 day after I got a very positive home pregnancy test, I had my doubts. I woke up and just didn’t feel pregnant anymore. The cramps that had been there in my lower abdomen off and on for the last 7 days were gone. And I just knew the pregnancy was too. I went on all morning thinking this way until the nurse practitioner called me at noon to tell me my hcg level was 309. 309!

The minute I hung up the phone, the pregnancy cramps returned. Almost as if the only thing causing them was my belief in the pregnancy. And maybe it was.

This cycle repeated itself when I went back for my second beta on Saturday morning. I woke up and found myself wondering, “what if it’s gone?” I quickly dismissed the thought, knowing that as soon as the call came through around lunchtime with the second beta number, I would be reassured again.

Except, the call never came. I tried to busy myself, but eventually found myself staring at my phone, willing it to ring. It did not. My clinic had assured me that they would run the order STAT and we would get the results that day by the time they closed at 12:30. Finally, at 1:30 the clinic’s lab tech called me to tell me they did not have the results yet and they were closing for the day, so that I would need to wait until Sunday morning for the nurse to call.

All Saturday afternoon and evening I convinced myself I wasn’t pregnant any more. That I needed to stop thinking of myself as lucky-this-time and get used to the fact that I’m unlucky-all-the-time.

Sunday morning, waiting for the phone call to finally come through, I felt as unpregnant as ever. But again, the phone call never came. I called the clinic at 11:30am and despite being open half-day for time-sensitive weekend procedures, the after-hours voicemail was on. All I could do was leave a very angry message that nobody would hear until Tuesday morning when the front office staff would be back from the 4^th of July holiday.

I spent the next several hours crying my eyes out. How could they do this? Where was their sensitivity and compassion? If there’s one person you should never hold out hcg results on, it’s someone who’s had recurrent early miscarriages.

Last night, against my husband’s wishes, I went out and bought a new pack of pregnancy tests. I just needed to know if that line was still there. And as of this morning, it was. But then I spent an ungodly amount of time analyzing whether or not it was darker than the test I took on Friday. I just couldn’t tell. When I finally looked up from the two pee sticks I’d been staring at, I saw I had a missed call and voicemail from the clinic.

Results of Saturday’s beta: 789.

789! Turns out some glitch in the computer system meant the nurses hadn’t been notified that the results were back. 789. Suddenly, I’m pregnant again. Suddenly, I’m lucky again. And the next time my clinic wants to see me isn’t until my 6-week ultrasound.

Just like that, they’re throwing me back in that other world where women get pregnant and then have an ultrasound and that’s that.

Except I’ll never really live there in that world. Mentally, no matter how far along this pregnancy gets, I know I’ll always be an hour away from becoming unpregnant again.