Ovulation tests: to do or not to do?
When trying to get pregnant, a friend might recommend you buy some ovulation tests to be absolutely sure not to miss your ovulation window. In the US, I found a huge pack of 20 tests that was 40 dollars, but in Kenya the price was 40 dollars for 5 tests… oh well.
The rough instruction for using these are:
· Pee in a cup. (Make sure you never drink from this cup again)
· Like in biology, use a little “pipette” to put a few drops into the test window
· Wait a few minutes and see if the“test” line appears next to the control line. If so, have sex that day.
There are a few complications though. How much pee to put in the test? What time to pee? I first read online that morning was better because urine was more concentrated, but then saw the instructions actually advised against that time, as it would more easily lead to false positive. The ideal times, I am told, are between 10 and 12 AM. What if you didn’t feel like peeing at that time?
With work, I once had to spend a few days at a retreat location a few hours’ drive away from our home. I remember sneaking out at the conference’s tea break to steal one of the coffee mugs, dash into a toilet to do a test, stay 5 minutes to wait for answer, then find the least possible weird place to leave a coffee mug washed by hand, but that probably still had some traces of pee in it. We were trying to evaluate whether it was worth Richard driving to the conference center in order not to miss ovulation time.
Which brings me to the next weird thing about this test. Say at last the test is positive — this may require a couple of tries, as sometimes ovulation is much later than you think, leading to worry the previous days. You have sex. These times, I find, it was really impossible for me not to think about the test when having sex — it’s just blatantly obvious this is the time to make or break the month.
So overall, I would say maybe do it one month to get an idea of when your ovulation window tends to be, but don’t get hooked up on it every cycle. It might ruin your intimate life. And most doctors would just say it’s just as good to have sex every other day around the time when ovulation might happen. Your partner will likely prefer it that way.
