Not exactly how I pictured my first ultrasound but here we are…! Many of you warned me that different labs can have different sensitivities in their testing protocol for hCG but I didn’t expect such a low value. My numbers had been more than tripling in 48-72 hours so when I went to Quest four full days after my last reading of 4000, only to see 5967, I completely panicked. It’s true that at or above levels of 6000, hCG becomes less of a reliable indicator of gestational health, but given my past history we took it seriously. Luckily, at this point, what you see on the ultrasound trumps hCG values, and we saw everything we were supposed to see in the correct place (gestational sac, yolk sac, fetal pole) all measuring where we would expect for 5wk4days. Repeating the bloodwork with my clinic lab (Unilab) to compare, and possible explanations if the number truly is that low include wildly different sensitivities (best case), a vanishing twin (odd case), or the embryo truly not progre...