Fertility tracking tools

I admit it.  I am a gadget freak.  I like to tinker and play with widgets and gizmos.  So, when we started trying to conceive, I went looking for TTC gadgets.   If you have not gone looking yourself, you would probably be surprised at how many gadgets and gizmos are available for tracking fertility signs.  I have already introduced you to the "ovulation microscope."  I actually own two of these gadgets.  The Fertile-Focus is a small, lipstick-shaped microscope that is designed to be unobtrusively carried about on one's person.  It works... mostly.  It only has 50x magnification.  The "slide" you put your saliva on is basically the back of the lens, and when I look into it I feel like the LED light is burning a hole in my brain.  But, it works.

The Fertility Tracker (tm) is a slightly larger, less discreet model but still easily portable.  It has 100x magnification and comes with six actual (plastic, unfortunately) slides.  I can keep my results around for a few days for comparison, which I really like.  The pictures on this site are taken through the lens of the Fertility Tracker (tm) with my Canon digital camera.

But wait!  There's more!  I also bought an OV Watch (tm).  This gizmo is designed to be worn on the wrist like, well, a watch.  It has little sensors in it that test perspiration for electrolyte content.   It is an expensive gizmo. The "watch" itself costs around a hundred bucks, plus you have to buy a new sensor each month and those are about $40 each.  You can get package deals where you buy the watch and multiple sensors at the same time, but I'm glad I did not do that because this thing just does not work for me.

It works by looking for a surge in chloride ions.  The problem is that women normally have more than one chloride ion surge in each cycle.  For the "normal" 28-day cycle, the first chloride surge comes about 5 or 6 days before ovulation.  There is a second surge that occurs close to the time of the LH surge (just after it), so just a few hours before ovulation.  The OV watch, in the case of a "normal" 28-day cycle, looks for that first surge and starts counting down to ovulation.

If your cycle is longer than 28 days, however, the first surge may be much more than 5 - 6 days before ovulation.  In fact, the surge that comes 5 - 6 days before ovulation for women with cycles of 30 - 39 days may be the second or even the third surge their bodies go through in a month.   To see a graph of how the surges line up, check  ovwatch.com.  Unfortunately, their graph only depicts a "typical" 28 day cycle, so if you're not "typical," they don't have much to say to you.

This is all well and good if you have regular cycles that are about the same length every month.  OV Watch can be programmed to recognize that your cycle is longer and then it will look for the second (or subsequent) surge before it starts counting down.   But, if your cycles vary from month to month, OV Watch can not cope.  Each month, it will look for your surge based on the length of your last cycle (or based on an average length, which could be even worse).   If you have yo-yo cycles (long, short, long, short), it will be wrong every time!   The worst part though, in my opinion, is that these chloride surges can happen whether or not you ovulate.  They just happen to line up with ovulation, timing wise, but they do not directly correlate with ovulation.  So, the OV watch tells you that it is five days before ovulation and you believe it, but you may or may not actually ovulate.  In spite of its name, the "OV" watch is NOT an ovulation predictor. There is only one, tiny note of that in their documentation, "Women whose menstrual cycles are anovulatory might get misleading results from this device."

Of course the most famous and well-known fertility gadget is the Basal Body Thermometer.  This little jewel is not much different from a regular thermometer, just a little more precise.  If used every day, first thing in the morning after at least three solid hours of sleep, it can detect the rise in body temperature that is a tell-tale sign of progesterone production which is an indication that ovulation has taken place.

Added to my arsenal of gadgets are the OPK test strips that test for LH surge and the home pregnancy test kits for "just in case" purposes (I'm sure I'll need them some day), as well as Preseed (tm) lubricant because every other lubricant (including saliva, apparently) kills sperm.  I have my own little science lab going on.  It's pretty cool, actually.

I may miss all the testing and playing with microscopes after I get pregnant.