Читать книгу Getting Pregnant For Dummies - Sharon Perkins - Страница 24

You may think this is a no-brainer: If you’re not getting pregnant, it seems like you’ve already diagnosed yourself with infertility! However, diagnosing a lack of pregnancy is the easy part; figuring out why you’re not getting pregnant is the hard part.

After reading through Chapter 6, which discusses simple techniques for increasing your pregnancy odds, or Chapters 11 and 12, which explain some of the tests used to diagnose infertility, of this book, you may be able to diagnose the reason for your difficulty in getting pregnant without any help from your doctor. For example, you may be having sex at the wrong time of the month — your “infertility issue” may be solved with a calendar, a thermometer, and an ovulation predictor kit! Or you may not have realized how irregular your periods were — 35 days apart one month, 40 the next, 60 the next — maybe you’re not ovulating on a regular basis.

Your gynecologist can run a few simple blood tests to help determine whether or not you’re ovulating. Ovulation is, after all, the first step in getting pregnant, and usually blood tests or observation of your own cervical mucus and temperature (see Chapter 6 for ways to figure this out) can help you figure out when you’re ovulating so you can time sex accordingly.

If you’re still not pregnant after six months of “hitting the mark,” it’s time for more testing; your doctor may suggest a test to see if your tubes are open and testing on your partner to see if “his boys can swim.”

This process of looking for the problem and then seeing if it’s fixed can take a few months. Only 20 percent of infertile couples never have a definite answer to why they can’t get pregnant, so the odds are in your favor.