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Saturday, July 18, 2009

Here we go again...

So, today I finally got crosshairs on my Fertility Friend chart. But they're not the ones I want. Here's what my chart looked like right after I added in the high temp this morning:

The problem is that I am 99.99999999% positive that I ovulated two days later, on CD13. This is based on my cervical mucus and lack of a temperature rise until CD14 (yes I know there's a random high temp on CD10, but based on my CM and temps after that, I'm convinced it's an abberation and not really indicative of anything).

The thing that's messing up Fertility Friend is the postive OPK on CD10. Normally, you'll ovulate 24-48 hours after a +OPK, but we all know what happened to me last time: the big O showed up a full 72 hours after I got a positive, and it looks like the same thing is happening this time around (24-48 hours is only the average, and there are always exceptions - so for my last cycle and this one, I just seem to be outside of the usual curve).

The first thing I tried to get Fertility Friend to switch the date was to remove the +OPK on CD10. This worked, but I ended up with dashed crosshairs instead of solid ones:

Yet again, the problem is due to OPKs. I took one on CD13 for no real reason, just out of curiosity since it didn't look like I'd O'd yet and I wanted to see if the surge was building up again. Obviously not! So I didn't feel any real compuction about removing it, since it was really pretty meaningless and of no charting value.

And voila! Solid crosshairs!

I was 99.99999999% positive that the other chart was wrong, and I am 99.99999999% positive that this one is right.

Of course, instead of doing all of that, I can just manually set the ovulation date and coverline, so now that's what I've gone back and done (which probably makes this entire post kind of useless, but oh well - some people collect stamps, other people watch birds, I play with Fertility Friend). I prefer to leave the OPKs in because I like to add my completed charts to Fertility Friend's chart gallery so other women can see them - this way, just in case there's another woman who is having the same problem with ovulating later than usual after a +OPK, she can see that she's not the only one.

It might not make a lot of sense to go to all of this trouble, especially since we're covered with FWPing either way. But I don't want a repeat of the confusion and disappointment with the negative HPTs last cycle, when I thought Aunt Flo was several days late because Fertility Friend estimated my ovulation date way too early - so if there's any question about the matter, I'd rather err on the side of later.

Worst case scenario, AF shows up a few days earlier than I think she should - if that happens, I'll just go back into my chart and change the O-date back to CD11, like Fertility Friend thought it should be. If she shows up on the date that I think she should, then I'll know I'm right and I'll leave it as is. And if she doesn't show up at all, well...that would be the best!

P.S. I feel like I should add that Fertility Friend is normally pretty good at what it does...but on the other hand, it is still just a computer program, not an intuitive human being, so it just doesn't deal very well with unusual situations - and I seem to be presenting it with a lot of those lately, haha!

1 comment:

  1. Based on your temperatures I think you're right. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you!

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