A darker shade of pale grey.

"You can't be a little bit pregnant" is one of those oft-spouted grammatical axioms; "It's black or white – either you are or you aren't," or so they say, and so I believed until that terrible month of January when, for a week and half, I was neither one nor the other.

Now I see pregnancy more as a scale of grey ranging from pure white to deep black. A positive pee-stick is a good start, but that's all it is, really: a start. You don't go directly from white to black, from two lines to baby; rather, your white becomes the palest of greys, a necessary but not sufficient step in the direction towards baby. That's the kind of grey I was when I saw that double line last Wednesday: the palest.

But: Saturday's number was 359. From 150 on Thursday, that's a doubling time of 38 hours.

The pale darkened.

The endocrinologist had urged me to schedule a third blood draw since my TSH was too high for his liking (2.34 instead of 1.2; shattering the rule of thumb that correlates dosage to twice the patient's body weight, he increased my dosage of levothyroxine to 250 micrograms – it is not that I weigh 125 kilograms but rather that I am a medical marvel).

So I did, this morning, with a new new gynecologist, endocrinologist-recommended. ("What kind of doctor are you looking for?" he asked me. "Uhh ... somebody who does not refuse to authorize a second blood draw because 'there's no evidence' of pregnancy since 'lots of pee-sticks result in false positives' and the first round of potentially confirmatory blood is still in the vial, and then, upon agreeing to it reluctantly and exasperatedly after some patient-proffered untruths about vaginal bleeding, ask patronizingly if he should be expected to open his office on Saturday morning solely for a matter of such slight import, purposely ignoring that there are plenty of other medical establishments open for just those kind of blood-drawing activities at that time, all topped off by a goodbye in the form of 'see you in a few weeks ... if you really are pregnant,'" is what I wanted to suggest. But I went with: "Someone like you." And I meant it. Aww.)

Today's number is 944. It doubled in 34 hours.

And the pale darkened some more.

It's still pale, though. Anything could happen, but then again, that's always true, for everything. Pregnancies, babies, children, adults – all can be lost in the blink of an eye. At any stage of life, there are no guarantees that this day is not the last.

It's still pale; but also, it's grey. As many of you have gently suggested, that is something to accept and to celebrate. We don't know what the future might hold, but we know what today holds. And for that reason, the bottle of boozeless bubbly that I hestitatingly bought last Wednesday and promptly shoved into a closet is now on ice.

Thank you, friends, for helping me to see this. When we fill our glasses tonight, I will be raising mine not only to today but also to you. May all of our dreams come true.