While I have certainly had my share of symptoms at this point, the one thing worrying me was that I hadn't shown a bit of morning sickness.  I made the most absolutely worst mistake any pregnant woman could make and compared my pregnancy to Marcella's.  She was having traumatic morning sickness.  While I know that not all women experience the joy of nausea, I was eager to have some sign that this pregnancy was going to stick.  I called the OBGYN's office, only to be told that results for the the hCG levels, which may indicate the health of a pregnancy, wouldn't be back for another week.  Desperate to confirm my pregnancy in the only hormone-crazed way I knew, I picked up another HPT, and this time I got THE EPT.  How could you go wrong with the most well known test? 

Well, to my horror, the test was barely positive, and took some time to become so.  Fortunately, my websurfing paid off, and I came across a list of HPTs, and their sensitivies.  To my relief I found that the EPT is actually several hundred times less sensitive than most other brands.  I immediately ran back to the store and picked up two more tests.  This time I picked a moderately sensitive one that should be positive for the amount of hCG I imagine I should have.  Thankfully both were strongly positive, and as an added bonus, could be turned into little keepsakes. How cute!

Of course if I was only a bit more patient, I could have waited until later in the week to find out that my hCG levels were perfectly fine, as I was told by Dr. Cook's nurse.

By the way, HPTs are basically little Western blots (a method of detecting protein with antibodies), and are some of the only ones I got to work sucessfully so far as a graduate student.