retroactive pregnancy

As creepy and weird as fertility treatments are, there is more oddness to come (hopefully) when you're pregnant. For example, the way they calculate the length of pregnancy is interesting. We all know about the alleged 9-months of gestation. But medical professionals count a pregnancy as having 40 weeks. I didn't know this until we conceived Waffle Girl, since I hadn't bought all the baby books and was pretty clueless.

So when does the clock start ticking off those 40 weeks? You might think it's the moment of conception.. or the end of the month when you get your positive test result, the elusive BFP (big freakin' positive). Well you would be wrong! The 40 weeks start at the beginning of your last period, i.e. the first day of your menstrual cycle. The weird thing about this is that you get "credit" for being pregnant during the two weeks before you even ovulated! So, you get pregnant, which is fantastic enough by itself, only to learn that you're officially 4 weeks into it already. Bonus!

Why am I thinking of this when we are still 11 days away from our embryo transfer? Because I may already be pregnant! In a totally theoretical way. If we get our frozen embryo on 1/26 and it "sticks" and we get a BFP, then within a matter of days an actual medical expert will retroactively declare that we've been pregnant since 1/5! Which means that I am, as of this writing, already 10 days pregnant. Woo-hoo! In the present tense, this is utterly 100% untrue (not to mention physically impossible). But I truly hope that Dr. Snaggletooth will do a little time travel and make it so.