OPK advice

[brycequinny]

It's our first cycle trying and I had a few questions about OPKs and ovulation for those of you with more experience please.

I have a 27 day cycle and I usually ovulate around day 15. I started testing with OPKs from CD12. On CD12 it was negative but CD13 and CD14 were both positive and then CD15 was negative in the morning (the second line was lighter but definitely there so the instructions say to count that as negative) and then negative again in the afternoon, this time with no second line at all.

I imagine I therefore ovulated on day 14. We had sex on CD9, CD13 and CD14 (DH was working away otherwise would have done more).

My questions are whether the OPKs on CD15 mean that I likely ovulated late on CD14 and if so, do you think not having sex on CD15 is an issue? I'm not sure whether having sex just after ovulation is as important as before? Any advice would be very welcome 🤗

Bump

Hiya, it's not possible to give a definite answer as ovulation can take place any time between 12-48 hours from your peak. Most people consider the day after the peak as ovulation day, and the day after that as 1DPO. BBT tracking can help confirm it, but OPKs should be enough.

The best thing to do is have as much sex as possible throughout your entire fertile period, and up to a day or two afterwards. Every day isn't always possible or comfortable for people, so just do what you can, when you can. There's a lot of advice about having sex before the peak so that there are sperm there already waiting for the egg. Sperm can live up to 5 days in the right conditions, so if you know you'll ovulate sometime between day 9-16, you might want to consider starting from day 10/11 and doing every other day (or whatever you can) until your OPKs go negative (or ovulation is confirmed, if you track BBT).

Thanks @KittyFantastica ! I had a positive OPK so would the day after the second peak be considered ovulation?

Yes the day after the peak is usually ovulation day, but can be any time 12-48 hours after peak as PP said. So I would personally say for you, CD15 was your ovulation day if you still had a peak on CD14.
If you are keen to narrow it down, you could try BBT but personally I wouldn't bother, I used to do it but don't feel like it was necessary. As long as you're trying regularly within your fertile window, that should be enough.

Thank you ☺️