You probably know many women who have gotten pregnant the first month they tried. Chances are, they made sure they had intercourse on the day they knew they were ovulating and two weeks later they announced their good news. If you are a woman who struggles with infertility, your irregular periods may be at the forefront of the struggle. Knowing that your doctor will not even see you until you've tried to conceive for a year, you may be at your wits' end.
You probably know many women who have gotten pregnant the first month they tried. Chances are, they made sure they had intercourse on the day they knew they were ovulating and two weeks later they announced their good news. If you are a woman who struggles with infertility, your irregular periods may be at the forefront of the struggle. Knowing that your doctor won't even see you until you've tried to conceive for a year, you may be at your wits' end. However, there are ways of planning a pregnancy even if the only thing regular about your periods is their irregularity.
The key to getting pregnant is to know when you are ovulating. Women with regular cycles of 28 to 30 days usually ovulate between 10 and 14 days after the first day of their period. Women with cycles that sometimes last 21 days and other times last 35 days have a hard time even guessing when they are going to ovulate.
Before giving up, try these four tips to deal with unknown ovulation times and you just might be surprised when you take that next pregnancy test.
Tip #1 - Buy a kit.
The easiest method of trying to determine ovulation is to buy an ovulation predictor test at your local pharmacy. They test urine to determine whether or not a woman is ovulating. The downside to these kits is that, if you have absolutely no idea when you are going to ovulate, you could be buying a lot of kits until you get a positive result. The other negative about ovulation predictor tests is that they have a somewhat high rate of being inaccurate.
Tip #2 - Track your temperature.
Changes in basal body temperature are a fairly accurate way of determining when ovulation is about to occur.
Because these changes in temperature are so slight, it is best to take your temperature with a thermometer specifically designed to measure basal temperatures. Keep the thermometer close to your bed and take your temperature as soon as you wake up in the morning. Record the temperature each day and it will be easy to see when your temperature is rising. When you see the rise in the temperature, you'll know that you are ovulating.
This is a much more inexpensive and accurate way of figuring out on which days you are most likely to get pregnant.
Tip #3 - Monitor your mucus.
If you aren't going to try the predictor tests and you are frustrated with tracking temperatures, you can track the changes in your cervical mucus. As your body gets ready to ovulate, the mucus becomes more clear and stretchy. When the mucus reaches this consistency, you will know that you are ovulating.
Tip #4 - Have a lot of intercourse.
It seems like too obvious an answer to a challenging problem. However, if you are a woman with chronically irregular menstrual cycles, having frequent intercourse could get you pregnant faster than the above three tips. Sperm can live in a woman's body for four days, so as long as intercourse occurs four days before ovulation, conception can occur. The best frequency of intercourse is every 48 hours, as a frequency more than that can adversely affect sperm viability. A frequency less than that and you may miss that ovulation window.
Trying to get pregnant with irregular menstrual cycles can be challenging, but not impossible. Try these four tips and you just might be surprised with a pregnancy next month.
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