A concerned other half needs advice

[paolocee]

My girlfriend, just turned 39, been TTC (see, I know some of the lingo) for 5 years.

Had one unsuccessful IVF cycle.

Yesterday she had a positive ClearBlue Conception Indicator at around 5pm. It was the day her period was due. It said conception had been 1-2 weeks ago which would have been spot on. She'd been suffering from bad cramps for the past few days. Very grumpy too (no change there, then ;)). Had odd food cravings. Higher than average temperature. Experienced apparent implantation cramps and a little spotting a week ago. All looked good. We were very excited. Very.

Then she retested again last night at 8pm. A BFN. Not to worry we thought, she'd drunk a gallon of water - the HCG must've been diluted.

We'll leave it until morning and a FMU (is that right? I may be straying from my comfort zone now). Another BFN. Utter gloom. Total and utter gloom.

She's on the sofa now watching a week's worth of Corrie. She still hasn't come on, although, as she's felt for the last few days she feels like she's about to.

My guess is that it was a chemical pregnancy. But is there still hope? Any words of wisdom much appreciated. I feel so helpless.

Best of luck this month Swedgirl! Fingers crossed for you. TCOYF is indeed very informative, though those candid cervical mucus pictures are hard to forget ...

Welcome to MN!

Hi MainlyMaynie. Nice to meet you too. Yes, I think it will make me feel more in control. I've never charted my temp before, I've learnt to listen to changes in my body, but I think doing both makes sense. You have moved too?! You can appreciate the stress then! Where were you and where are you now?

Hi SomethingSuitablyWitty... I have not yet seen such photographs on the site - just had my breakfast but might brave it later.. ! Thanks (shock)

My DP read TCOYF when we were first together (because I used it for contraception and he'd never heard of it) and was transfixed by the middle "full colour picture" section!!

hey guys, been looking for these photographs on the website (lots of smiley babies!), but now realise that these are in the book. I'll just have to wait for the post! I'm intrigued now..!

Thanks Maples.. Duofertility does sound good. My BF has made enquiries with the company to see if it's right for us. It certainly sounds preferable to IVF in my opinion

I only charted my temp for a couple of months and after that I could just tell from cervical fluid. I usually used an OPK to check as well. Both times I got pregnant it was on the day of ovulation, so I think that's what we need! The Duofertility thing looks really good.

I moved from UK to Netherlands when DS was 8 weeks. How long have you been in Sweden? TBH with having DS it actually lessened the stress as I was just focused on him. Having waited so long, it was all absorbing. It gets hard to keep up hope after years of trying, but it is so worth hanging on.

Hi MainlyMayne,
I can imagine that your son must have been a great distraction from being in an alien environment. So far I have judged when I'll be fertile by cervical fluids, but never temperature. Will it suddenly drop or increase when I'm ovulating?
I'm keeping positive as I've two more cycles before I'm due back in the UK for IVF, and I'd really like this to happen without all the intrusion that IVF entails

Hello again MainlyMaynie, sorry for poor spelling!
We've been in Sweden for 6 weeks!

Swedgirl - temps are actually a good thing to "post" track with. You will notice an increase in temperature after ovulation. Depending on the egg dropping, this is touch and go as to its effectiveness

But here is the bitch of it all - ovulation has three phases. The phase when the LH hormone increases, then CM increases and the ovulatory phase takes over. This can happen in about 5 - 8 days. Post that is the luteal phase - in essence the two week wait.

The 5 - 8 days tries to keep in mind that your egg may drop anytime in a week after you've had the positive smiley face. Not everyone will drop the egg in 48 hours so it's not very reliable to base it around a day or two when you ovulate.

Medically, 70% of women may have the ovulatory phase before day 10 and after day 17 - since we don't all have a 28 day cycle and also, the human body doesn't whatever it likes anyway.

The best chance you can give yourself HONESTLY is to hump every other day from the day your AF finishes until the day your next AF arrives. The egg dropping is the biggest mystery and none of us are sure when that will happen.

Kicktheguru, thanks, its so baffling. You sure do know your stuff. Looks like we'll just have to keep at it

You're one of the few people on here who I really wouldn't mind if you fell pregnant before me. :)

Don't listen to the wives tales.

Have a LOT of rumpy pumpy - at a maximum of every second day. Oh and then lie with a pillow under yer bum for at least 20mins after rumpy pumpy so that you give his swimmers the best possible chance of getting to where they need to be for the longest possible time.

Hi swedgirl I've been reading this thread, you really have been having a tough time. I'm a long timer too and have recently learnt a lot from temping, good luck with it. May I recommend the fertility friend website for charting, they have tutorials that help you along your way, sign up for free and they send the tutorials to your email.

Hi kick, I'm still completely baffled by your description of ovulation and eggs dropping! The egg being released IS ovulation and one witnessed (see link) took 15 minutes to complete. To get pg from post-ovulation sex it would need to be within hours. news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7447942.stm

Purple

You can DTD only on two days a month as you want other people to believe. I am glad that you are so certain that you only need to have sex twice a month, but that doesn't work as well for everyone as it does for you.

I choose to follow my doctors advice and DTD EOD in case the actual egg dropping isn't exactly on the day or two that you are 100% certain it happens.

Since I, even with a regular as all hell 29 day cycle, have picked up only two smiley faces in the past year, I will still DTD over a longer period of time to try and make sure that the entire ovulation phase is covered. Which includes the pre-ovulatory phase, the ovulatory phase and the luteal phase

We certainly aren't all as lucky as you are to be 100% of when our egg drops! Blimey you must have NO trouble falling pregnant at all!

Good luck in your future endeavours

A common approach relies on detecting, in a woman?s urine, the luteinizing hormone (LH) that typically surges on the ovulation day. The LH surge (sharp narrow peak in LH concentration) occurs a few hours before ovulation. Because that is really too late for anticipating ovulation, a related but more sophisticated fertility monitor additionally detects also a metabolite of estrogen, i.e., another hormone, which anticipates the LH surge by about a day.

Fundamentally the most serious detriment is the fact that ovulation as such is not detected by said fertility device or any other such available in the marketplace. Ovulation is merely assumed to occur some hours after the LH surge ? but the surge of the LH hormone is merely a trigger signal sent by the brain to the ovary. It says, ?ovary, let go of the ovum in our dominant follicle?, but it does not say that the ovary in fact did (or does).

This is a fundamental flaw because ovulation is known to fail to occur in approximately 20% of the follicles. Those follicles, triggered by the LH, undergo the cyclic event of follicle rupture but, despite the rupture, the egg does not come out ? there is no ovulation. Ovulation also fails to occur with another type of follicles, the so-called luteinized unruptured follicles. Yet, the LH surge can be seen in either case, and is therefore a false indicator.

The BBT approach is no longer recognized as medically valid even if it may be acceptable to some of the older physicians (and to the buyers of an expensive microcomputerized BBT monitor offered from Europe). This is because the so-called basal body temperature is a systemic variable that reflects, among other things, progesterone rise in peripheral blood after ovulation, usually one or two days later. It is a very indirect and non-specific biomarker. Even though in some women in some cycles a little-understood dip in the temperature graph may apparently be observed one day before the temperature rise, it is clear that the BBT method is of little value due to its lack of predictive capability and due to its fundamental unreliability. The BBT-rise data is known to have a large error bar since the rise can occur from 3 days before to 3 days after ovulation.

kicktheguru I think it's just the way you use the term 'ovulation' that purple found a bit confusing. I admit I did too, I haven't seen it used that way before (i.e. to refer to the whole sequence of pre-ovulation, (what I would call) ovulation itself and the luteal phase rather than just to the release of the egg itself). I agree of course that pinpointing the timing of the egg being released is impossible to any greater accuracy than 2-3 days unless you are being scanned, even TCOYF, for instance, is very clear about that and builds that margin of error into all the techniques.

I'm also interested by your suggestion that a clear temp shift may not necessarily be proof of the egg having already been released (except perhaps in cases of multiple ovulation where a second egg is released within 24 hours). Have you got any refs for that? I know that the LH surge signs (cervical fluid etc) are not reliable as an egg is not necessarily released after any given surge, which is why the ovulation predictor kits are not entirely to be trusted. But I hadn't heard of a clear and sustained temp shift being unreliable as well.

Although I am pregnant right now I am always interested in new research on this stuff as I plan to go back to using FAM for contraception as I did before.

I'm afraid you don't know how many times I have sex. You assume I use OPKs I don't- smiley face or no smiley face, they don't work for me. I agree that regular sex throughout the cycle, if that is manageable for a couple is a great way to go and the NHS advice. I take issue only with the idea that the "egg can drop" days after ovulation. Apologies again.

Sorry - the process of ovulation / ovulatory phase includes a three step approach according to some of the reports I've read.

I suppose saying the ovulatory phase is more correct and ovulation for the specific "go ahead and drop the egg" process - which STILL isn't an exact science and still no one knows when it happens :)

Didn't see your latest post when I wrote above. I'm v. interested in the study you mention that showed BBT rises occuring before as well as after ovulation. Have you got the refs for that one? If it's true that a BBT rise could show up 3 days before ovulation that endangers a key principle of TCOYF (which makes you wait 3 days post shift before assuming you are 'safe' if tta).

Purple

I just notice you running around contradicting me so I know you've got an issue with me. I notice today you agree with my DTD EOD whereas the other day you were jumping down my throat for saying that.

This is one of a million things I have read over the past couple of years about BBT

The ONLY places that continue to bang on about the usefulness of BBT and about how fabulously "normal" and "stable" each of our bodies are is forums. I do not get any of my information off forums - I read a lot of stuff (not off BBC news either) off specific medical case studies and journals. I worked for a newspaper so I know how they work as well

I would rather have a good medical study than blindly believe some of the stuff that is posted on a forum.

epublications.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1005&context=nursing_fac

I agree, if it's possible for a couple to do then it's a great way to go. I took issue with you saying it's impossible to time sex for conception. It's not exactly the same thing. I'm not "running around" but you give out a lot of advice and with a very authoritative tone. I don't agree with all you say and I also think some of the things you say are incorrect. I appreciate that you are not pleased with this. I bow out from here on. However much I disagree I will not comment further.

I think the important thing is to work out your own cycle and what works for you. Through years of tracking, including amongst other things a few months of monitoring bbt, using opks, cervical fluid monitoring, blood tests, I know how my ovulation works. I get 2 days of positive opks, accompanied by fertile cervical fluid, then I ovulate the next day, again with fertile cervical fluid. I have a 14 day luteal phase. I have only ever got pregnant through sex on the actual day of ovulation. I know this because DH was working away those months!

How often to have sex depends on your situation. For some people the least stressful thing is every two days through your cycle. But if you have a 45 day cycle and a 13 day luteal phase, it matters not a jot whether you have sex on days 9, 11, 13, 15 etc. There is no chance of that sex getting you pregnant. If you have a 26 day cycle and don't know or want to know your luteal phase length, then sex every 2 days is probably a good plan. But if sex every 2 days is too much for you or impossible due to other circumstances, there are ways of timing things. I think for some people (like me), the timing can be very important.

I only ever used BBT as a backwards check iyswim, it's just part of getting to know your body.

That's a really good explanation Mainly , there are a lot of factors in all of our lives - working out your cycle and working out what works for you is it exactly.