The Complete Guide to Pregnancy Testing
When is the right time to do a pregnancy test?
At first, this appears to be a simple question, but every situation is very different. Imagine the following scenarios:
- You are a married woman of 32, who really wants a baby. You have been taking your basal temperature and doing ovulation tests. Your period is a little late, and you want to find out if this is it.
- You are a teenage girl and you went a bit too far with your boyfriend a few weeks ago. Everything was so spontaneous that you did not use birth control. You haven’t been monitoring your periods, but it seems to be ages since you had the last one and it was definitely before you had sex. You are very scared and you need to know where you stand.
- You are about 24 and in a steady relationship. You haven’t been worried one way or the other about getting pregnant. Although you have been taking the pill on most occasions, you think you once forgot. You’ve noticed that your period is late and you want to know if you are pregnant.
Each situation is very different, but they all require a pregnancy test. In all of them, the main reason to suspect pregnancy is a late or missed period.
Which Kinds of Early Pregnancy Test Are Available?
Many women first do a home pregnancy test and later confirm the result by following up with a blood test, or don’t even bother with the second test at all.
Most home tests consist of a urine pregnancy test. This measures the presence of HCG (human chorionic gonadotropin), which enters the bloodstream about six days after the fertilised egg first implants in the uterus, and continues to increase as time goes on.
Although some pregnancy testing kits claim to be accurate from the first day that a period is late, this is not necessarily so. Many of them are not sensitive enough at this point and can give you a false result because the level of HCG in your system is not yet high enough to appear. It is therefore best to wait till a week after your missed period before you use a home pregnancy test kit.
If you are determined not to wait and to do an early pregnancy test, you may be best off doing a blood test. But depending on your health plan, you may find this is more expensive and more hassle as you have to get a doctor to order one. Therefore, you may prefer to wait until you are more certain of early pregnancy symptoms and do the home test in the meantime.
What Does It Mean if I Get a Negative Pregnancy Test Result But I Still Feel Pregnant?
This is a commonly asked question as it happens quite often. You think you have missed a period, or you keep getting what feels like premenstrual cramps but with no period, so you do a home pregnancy test. However, your result comes out as either negative or you only see a faint pregnancy test line. Yet the symptoms are still there and there is no period.
Based on the above, it is possible that you are pregnant, but the HCG test will not yet show it. To put your mind at rest, you could do a blood test – or wait another week and try again.
You may think that you know the right time to test, but it is a common misconception to believe that the test’s accuracy correlates with the time when you actually had sex, especially if this occurred several times and you can’t pinpoint the exact occasion when you may have conceived. In fact, this is completely irrelevant. The accuracy of the test is more dependent upon the time of ovulation. Sperm can wait up to five days in the fallopian tubes before they fertilise an egg. It is very easy to make a mistake regarding times of ovulation, especially if you have not been monitoring it until now. Therefore, you should not get disheartened if you initially receive a negative result, but you should try again if you find that the symptoms don’t disappear and your period still doesn’t arrive.
Cost of Pregnancy Tests
There is a variety of pregnancy testing kits on the market that are freely available over the counter at your local chemist. Prices obviously vary, so you may want to find out what’s available by checking on line. From simple urine tests to digital pregnancy tests, you can find many different permutations.
One way to find out what you’re getting is to look them up on line and read as many pregnancy test reviews to find out how accurate, sensitive, and easy to use they are.
To check out some reviews on line, click here.
Once you have found what seems to be the most accurate pregnancy test, see if it is sold at your local chemist and how much it costs.
Of course, if you want to try something that really is absolutely free, you could take an online pregnancy test. But if you do, you should make sure to press the correct link as some of them are clearly not real.
For a genuine online pregnancy testing site, which essentially calculates the chances of you being pregnant rather than giving you a definitive answer, click here.
And of course, it goes without saying that you should never rely solely on an online questionnaire and you should make sure to take a pregnancy test in real life.
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