Disclaimer: I’m not a medical doctor or provider. I’m simply sharing my personal experience. Please reach out to a medical professional for any medical advice.
My period cycle has always been off due to various reasons. I was using a period tracker app for over 10 years and the app would alert me when my period is about to start and when my ovulation period is happening. I thought I was set to get/avoid getting pregnant if I just followed the app’s guidance. Upon reading pregnancy forums, I quickly learned that getting pregnant and/or staying pregnant is actually quite hard due to medical conditions, miscalculated fertile windows, and life stressors. My cousin had mentioned ovulation sticks to me before. Just to be safe, I thought it’ll be helpful to buy some ovulation sticks off of Amazon to see how accurate my period app actually is! I was about to turn 30 and my husband and I thought of potentially starting to grow our family.
Before I talk about how I used the ovulation sticks, I want to quickly go over how the ovulation/ovulation sticks work. Usually women ovulate 14 days before their next period. On average, around 24-36 hours (this varies person to person) before a woman’s egg(s) is released from either the right or left ovary, a hormone called luteinizing hormone (LH) surges. This LH surge is what causes the egg to be released from the ovary. The ovulation sticks pick up on the LH, which tells the woman that they’re about to ovulate within the next 24-36 hours. On average, a woman is most fertile 5 days leading up to ovulation, day of ovulation, and the day after ovulation. That’s a lot of potential smexy time! A lot of online articles (how scientific sounding) say that it’s best to have sperm already waiting when the egg is released. Sperm can live up to 5 days in the woman’s reproductive system!
The ovulation sticks are very simple to use! You can either pee in a cup and dip the ovulation stick in or pee on the stick itself. They recommend you use your morning pee since your pee is the most concentrated at that time, which was what I did. The ovulation stick will test if any luteinizing hormone is present in your (morning) pee. The ovulation sticks that I used had an app that went with it. So every morning, I would go to the bathroom, pee on an ovulation stick, take a picture of it and upload it to the app. The app would start plotting a graph of my LH levels, which will show when there’s an upward trend (surge.) Overtime, i saw the sticks picking up hints of LH. It was very apparent when my LH was rising. The timeline matched my period tracker app timeline; however, the ovulation sticks gave me a more precise timing and made me feel more confident knowing when my “fertile” window is.
After my ovulation period, I entered what they call the “two week wait.” This is when the woman isn’t sure if they successfully got pregnant or not so she will need to wait approximately two weeks to find out. Since this was what I called the trial run of seeing how accurate my period tracker app was and to see how my body ovulation cycle, I did my best to just relax and not think about whether or not it was a success. However, I did read on the ovulation stick app that a lot of people measured their basal body temperature (BBT) after ovulation to see if they’re pregnant. Basically, you’ll measure your body temperature right when you wake up and before you get out of bed. I had a basic thermometer on my night stand and every morning before I got out of bed, I would just measure my body temperature. I entered my BBT in the same app. If your BBT rises and stays up during the two week wait period, then it’s a high chance that you’re pregnant. My BBT did rise and stay up during my two week wait period.
On the day when my supposed period was about to start, I peed on a pregnancy test strip. And viola, I saw a faint line show up. It was the faintest of a line you can ever see so I told myself to test again the next day. I used a pregnancy test strip for the next 3 days and the line grew stronger and stronger. On the 5th day of my missed period, which happened to fall on Valentines’ Day 2022, I used a First Response digital pregnancy test and the word “PREGNANT” showed up. All I thought was, “Well, that happened a lot quicker than I expected.”
I showed my husband and he smiled and said, “Well that was fast.”
That’s it! That’s how we got pregnant! I do suggest trying out the ovulation sticks, but try not to obsess over it! I strongly believe that we got pregnant so quickly because I wasn’t stressing about it. Let me know if you have any questions/thoughts in the comment box below! Best of luck!