Today, I am at that point where every lady that has tried to get pregnant has found themselves. My period is late.
If the movies are to be believed, I should get my hopes up. It could mean that I am pregnant! But, I have been down this road before and I know better.
In the first year of trying to conceive you find yourself getting your hopes up that each month could be THE month. You try and convince yourself to wait to take a pregnancy test, you inevitably take a pregnancy test WAY to early for it to tell you anything, and then you wait, each day taking a pregnancy test and staring at it like it holds some inscrutable secret.
After a while, you start to do all the things:
- Take apart the pregnancy test to see the line better
- Research the test to see how sensitive it is (First Response Early Pregnancy Tests can measure 5 miu/ml of HCG (the pregnancy hormone) or more, average ones are 25 miu/ml or more)
- Figure out how long it takes for you to test positive based on the sensitivity (If 1-3 miu/ml is my baseline and it doubles every day after implantation then I would get a positive pregnancy test somewhere between…..)
- Figure out which test is least likely to have evap lines
- Discover what evap lines are lol
But no matter what course you take to get there, every woman that has tried to get pregnant will inevitably find herself in the same place: Staring at a stick, praying for two lines.
You squint. Hold it up to the light. Hold it away from the light. Take a picture with your phone and zoom in. Change the color filter to try and see better.
Regardless, you spend a lot of time squinting, trying to see a line that isn’t there. In the community of women trying to get pregnant, this is called line eyes. Trying to see the positive pregnancy line next to the control line.
I remember being excited to test – now I hate it. I know what the answer is going to be and letting myself take a pregnancy test is like letting in a little bit of hope that will eventually be destroyed.
We have been trying to get pregnant for about three and a half years, I don’t think it was until two and a half years in that I just stopped testing altogether – after all, what’s the point?
This was the internal conversation I found myself in this morning: My period is three days late. I am having no symptoms of it starting soon. My breasts still hurt (a sign I am still producing progesterone, this tends to stop when my hormones drop off before my period). Should I test? Is it possible I could be pregnant? What are the odds of us coming all the way to Greece for IVF only to find out that we were already pregnant?
So, we went to a little φαρμακείο to pick up a pregnancy test (9 Euros), and I did the pregnancy test. Can you guess the result?