... I could have saved a hell of a lot of cash on birth control over the past 20 years of my life.
As it turns out, getting knocked up isn't as easy as those girls on "Teen Mom" make it look. As a matter of fact, I don't know a single girlfriend who hasn't endured her share of TTC (see: Acronyms) woes along the path to the delivery room.
I was one of the last girls in my group to give into the baby buzz. I loved my life too much to have it change. My husband and I were having fun, travelling at the drop of a dime, getting a little buzzed on the weekends, sleeping in, staying out late, and simply enjoying life in our first year of marriage together. It was just too soon. I was clear that I wanted to be married at least one year before even contemplating the decision that would change our lives forever while turning them upside-down in the process.
Then my girlfriends started "trying" - and much to my surprise, NOT getting pregnant. I held their hands through the tears, listened to tales from the doctors office, learned all about fertility testing, HcG levels, multiple miscarriages, ovulation sticks, cervical mucus, basal body temperatures, you-name-it. These girls were doing everything right in the science experiment that had become their bodies and yet, no baby.
Suddenly, it seemed like it actually might be harder to get pregnant than to stay unpregnant, a realization that made me begin to consider my own age and birth control status. At the time, I was 30 and had been on Birth Control Pills for more than half of my life. Despite all the medical assurances that birth control pills and long durations of use do not affect fertility in any way, I started to read those crazy message boards and I started to worry.
Perhaps the research was wrong or at least, inconclusive. From my perspective, it sure seemed like there were a LOT of real life cases where women who had been on the pill for long periods of time went off and encountered trouble getting pregnant and/or staying pregnant.
One hypothesis for this is that women are going on the pill so early these days (mid-teens) that we are halting our reproductive process nearly as soon as it's come to maturation and by doing so, we are stopping the conveyor belt before we even really know how it works - or kinks it might have. Hence the birth control pills may not necessarily be to blame for fertility issues, they may have just masked existing issues before we had a chance to discover them and fix them. Either way, I started feeling really icky about all those crazy hormones I was juicing myself up with on a daily basis.
I hadn't planned to go off the pill until the summer of 2012. I figured, if I was going to open myself up to the option of pregnancy, I also needed to be prepared to expect it to happen, like, the next day. And I simply wasn't.
But one day in April, I forgot to take my pill. And then two days later, I forgot again, and the day after that I forgot again and I figured, Hey, I'm married now - it won't be a scandal if something does happen and it's more likely something WON"T happen for quite some time. So I'm just going to stop taking these and let my body figure out what it's doing by itself.
So I stopped taking the pill in April of 2012 - even before the end of the cycle. I didn't care. I was just done. My husband and I agreed that we were not trying, we simply weren't trying NOT TO.
6 months went by and I wasn't knocked up. I couldn't believe that I'd spent so many years of my life terrified of getting impregnated by accident, and now, with no precautions whatsoever, it wasn't happening.
Did you know, there is really only a 12-24 hour period of time when conception can happen? I didn't. Neither did my husband. I always thought it was so strange in the movies when women would call their husbands at work and say "Come Home Right Now! I am Ovulating!" That elusive moment of conception is a needle in a haystack!! A few more tidbits I've picked up in my research:
I was one of the last girls in my group to give into the baby buzz. I loved my life too much to have it change. My husband and I were having fun, travelling at the drop of a dime, getting a little buzzed on the weekends, sleeping in, staying out late, and simply enjoying life in our first year of marriage together. It was just too soon. I was clear that I wanted to be married at least one year before even contemplating the decision that would change our lives forever while turning them upside-down in the process.
Then my girlfriends started "trying" - and much to my surprise, NOT getting pregnant. I held their hands through the tears, listened to tales from the doctors office, learned all about fertility testing, HcG levels, multiple miscarriages, ovulation sticks, cervical mucus, basal body temperatures, you-name-it. These girls were doing everything right in the science experiment that had become their bodies and yet, no baby.
Suddenly, it seemed like it actually might be harder to get pregnant than to stay unpregnant, a realization that made me begin to consider my own age and birth control status. At the time, I was 30 and had been on Birth Control Pills for more than half of my life. Despite all the medical assurances that birth control pills and long durations of use do not affect fertility in any way, I started to read those crazy message boards and I started to worry.
Perhaps the research was wrong or at least, inconclusive. From my perspective, it sure seemed like there were a LOT of real life cases where women who had been on the pill for long periods of time went off and encountered trouble getting pregnant and/or staying pregnant.
One hypothesis for this is that women are going on the pill so early these days (mid-teens) that we are halting our reproductive process nearly as soon as it's come to maturation and by doing so, we are stopping the conveyor belt before we even really know how it works - or kinks it might have. Hence the birth control pills may not necessarily be to blame for fertility issues, they may have just masked existing issues before we had a chance to discover them and fix them. Either way, I started feeling really icky about all those crazy hormones I was juicing myself up with on a daily basis.
I hadn't planned to go off the pill until the summer of 2012. I figured, if I was going to open myself up to the option of pregnancy, I also needed to be prepared to expect it to happen, like, the next day. And I simply wasn't.
But one day in April, I forgot to take my pill. And then two days later, I forgot again, and the day after that I forgot again and I figured, Hey, I'm married now - it won't be a scandal if something does happen and it's more likely something WON"T happen for quite some time. So I'm just going to stop taking these and let my body figure out what it's doing by itself.
So I stopped taking the pill in April of 2012 - even before the end of the cycle. I didn't care. I was just done. My husband and I agreed that we were not trying, we simply weren't trying NOT TO.
6 months went by and I wasn't knocked up. I couldn't believe that I'd spent so many years of my life terrified of getting impregnated by accident, and now, with no precautions whatsoever, it wasn't happening.
Did you know, there is really only a 12-24 hour period of time when conception can happen? I didn't. Neither did my husband. I always thought it was so strange in the movies when women would call their husbands at work and say "Come Home Right Now! I am Ovulating!" That elusive moment of conception is a needle in a haystack!! A few more tidbits I've picked up in my research:
- You are more likely NOT to conceive than to conceive in any given month. The stats don't lie and your chances decrease with age (duh).
- The pregnancy rate per month of a woman in her 20’s is about 20-25%.
- Women in their thirties - about 15%.
- Women 35-40 - about 10% per month.
- If you wait to have sex on the day you are ovulating, there is a good chance you could miss your window. Most women miscalculate their ovulation day and after it has happened, it's too late. The window has closed.
- It's best to have sex the week prior to when you think you will ovulate. Sperm can live in your body for days! So the key is to have them in there and waiting for that little egg to drop.
- Having sex every day or every other day isn't necessary (though of course it would increase your odds). Two times a week should be enough to keep the little tadpoles in your system and ready to pounce on their unsuspecting target.
- Abstaining from sex so your guy can "build it up" isn't a good idea either b/c the sperm can get stale and weaker the longer they wait to be released.
- While drinking alcohol is not proven to hurt fertility, smoking cigarettes IS. Stop smoking. Now. Whether you're trying to get pregnant or not. Because it's just bad for you!
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