Fertility and Doing the Pregnancy Limbo

by Heather Long | More from this Blogger

When you struggling to get pregnant, you may find that you are more than willing to throw $10 after $10 to purchase a home pregnancy test in order to find out if maybe, just maybe this time - you are pregnant. In fact, when I went through this the first time, I hated it. Now, having attempted to get pregnant for a while, I've literally begun to master ignoring this time period because otherwise I would drive myself nuts. The trouble is - even as efficient as the modern day pregnancy test is - it still needs ten to twelve days or longer before it can give you a positive result that you can believe.

That makes the waiting period between when you ovulated and the onset of your cycle to be worse than any wait for Christmas morning or end of the work day you've ever experienced before. In fact, you would probably enjoy counting down those days more than you would the timeframe to find out if this time, finally this time - you were successful in your attempts to conceive another baby.

Rite of Passage for Pregnancy

The pregnancy limbo is known to all of us. It's a rite of passage that women go through - especially when they are trying to conceive or have had trouble trying to conceive. It begins with ovulation, whether you use an ovulation predictor kit or you use the old counting method. Either way, that date is circled on your calendar. You and your spouse plan your attempts either through the old fashioned method or with a doctor's appointment and a fertility specialist.

Next comes the waiting.

And the waiting.

And the more waiting.

You will pay particular attention to every nuance of your body. You will notice changes no matter how subtle or slight. You will wonder if that is related to the fact that you are pregnant. The dangerous part of this time is that you can imagine symptoms that don't exist and I've known at least three women who began experiencing phantom morning sickness during this period of limbo as they waited for the time to arrive to take their pregnancy test and prayed for the line to turn pink.

Take a Deep Breath

This is the hard part - the waiting. One way or another, you will arrive at the time when you will have your result positive or negative. No matter how long that 10 to 14 days may seem, imagine the struggle to wait in the days before the early pregnancy tests were available and when the only confirmation a woman received that she was pregnant was when she missed more than one cycle and all the other factors began to add up.

Try to think of this time as training for all those days you are going to need patience for the child you are desperately trying to conceive. How did you cope with your pregnancy limbo?

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Learn more about Heather Long

Heather Long is 35 years old and currently lives in Wylie, Texas. She has been a freelance writer for six years. Her husband and she met while working together at America Online over ten years ago.

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