Ovulation Predictor Kits (OPK's)

What is an Ovulation Predictor Kit (OPK)? And how does it work?

The Jill Fellow Answer
An Ovulation Predictor Kit is a set of test sticks that are used by women to find out when they have had a surge of the LH hormone which occurs between 24 and 48 hours before an egg is released from their ovary. Women do this to find out when they are most fertile so they can have sexual intercourse at the right time. The rise in the LH (Luteinizing hormone) is called the LH surge.The individual tests in the ovulation predictor kit are referred to by doctors and those who use them as OPK's. A woman using the kit would pee on one of the OPK sticks each day prior to when they suspect she will ovulate. The test will almost always show two lines. A positive test shows two lines, but the test line is the same color or darker than the control line. The positive tests indicates that her body is gearing up to ovulate in a few days.

The test sticks look a lot like pregnancy tests, but they are very different. A pregnancy tests measures the hCG in a women's system through their urine while the OPK measures the LH hormone. With a pregnancy tests, a women pees on the end of the stick (or dips the stick in a cup of urine), and the test shows 2 lines ONLY if you are pregnant. The lines can be any color, but if there are two, she is pregnant. If the pregnancy tests shows only one line, she is NOT pregnant or has tested too soon. She would pee on or dip an OPK the same way, but the number of lines is not important with an OPK. Instead, she would have to look at the color of the lines to find out if it is positive or negative. OPK tests can be tricky to read, but an amazing Web site called Pee On a Stick shows pictures and answers lots of questions to help.

OPK's range in price from $1 for one stick to $30 for seven sticks. The brand "Answer" sells seven sticks for about $12 at Wal-mart and the brand Clear Blue Easy sells seven sticks for $23 to $30 depending on the store and the features of the test. The easiest tests to read are in the Clear Blue Easy Digitial kit. The stick is inserted into a digitial reader, and so instead of looking at the color of the lines, a woman just waits for a circle or a smiley face to show up on the screen. The circle indicates a negative, and the smiley face indicates a positive. Some doctors report that the $1 tests sold at dollar stores are not always accurate. Also, some say you have to be careful not to store or place OPK tests near pregnancy tests because the chemicals can affect each other and give inaccurate results.

Once a women receives a positive OPK, she will most likely ovulate in 12 to 48 hours. Once she ovulates, her egg will survive for about 12 hours. If the egg is fertilized during that 12 hours, she will not receive positive a pregnancy tests for about 9 days. This is because the egg is fertilized in the fallopian tube, and it takes about 9 days for the egg to travel to the uterus where it is implanted. The hCG will not appear in her urine until after the egg reaches the uterus.

An average couple who times everything right and has not physical problems has a 25% chance of getting pregnant each month.

The Jill Fellow Experience
Ok, so here is the fun part -- my fertility history in all its glory. So, I went off of the birth control pill in August of 2004. My first pregnancy came in June of 2006. That is a heck of a long time to wait. For the first year, we did nothing special, and we tried to not get pregnant. If we were fertile, we would have gotten pregnant because we didn't know what we were doing. In August of 2005, we officially started trying, and we (I) used parts of the fertility awareness method to time our action. This method involves charting your temperature, gaging the consistency of your cervical fluid and feeling your cervix with your figures to know when it is soft, low and open for business.

I charted my temperature each morning so that I could see the .5 to .9 degree shift that would indicate I had ovulated the day before. From there, I would get my period about 13 days later. The whole cycle was about 31 to 33 days each month. I watched my cervical mucus and took note or it, but I never felt my cervix to see if it was soft because that is crazy. After a year, we had no pregnancies so we went to a doctor who found that my mucus kills sperm. Actually he found an abnormality but before we could continue with testing, we got pregnant and had a baby in March of 2007.

We started trying for baby number two in May of 2007 when the baby was only two months because I wanted another baby right away, and I knew in the bottom of my heart that this was not going to be easy in spite of what everyone told us about "surprise" second babies. I didn't chart this round because I didn't care as much and because my cycles were still 31 to 33 days so I figured I was ovulating the same way.

Enter the OPK -- when I didn't get pregnant again after a year, I (not we) went back to the doctor and got the old tests read and analyzed. The doctors said openly that our first child could easily be a miracle and that I was not crazy to want to take control of the situation. In June of 2008 we started inter uterine insemination, in which the doctor inserted my husband's sperm passed my scary, sperm-killing fluid and into my cervix. I had to use OPK's to test for ovulation so I would know exactly when I ovulated and could time the insemination perfectly.

I bought a Clear Blue Easy Digital ovulation predictor kit and started planning. Since my cycle is normally 31 days and I ovulate on day 17 or 18, I was not going to start testing until day 13 or 14 (to save money.) But when I had some interesting mucus on day 11, I started testing just in case.

The tests were easy to use. (I get stage fright when I have to pee right on to the stick. I think I will miss and then not enough pee will hit the stick. I pee all the time, so I don't pee for a continues 5 second stream like the tests ask for.) So I caught my pee in a cup and dipped the stick in. After a few days, I got nervous and started slowing pouring the pee from the cup onto the stick, which I'm sure did nothing but put my mind at ease that I was following the directions. I got circles and not smiley faces on the digitial test for, yup, seven days in a row, and I even tested twice on the day I was expecting the positive (just to make sure.) The instructions say to not pay attention to the lines of the test stick when you remove it from the digitial reader, but I did away just to get an idea of what I would be up against if I couldn't afford another digitial kit (which I could not.)

After the seven tests were gone, I threw my baby girl and her friend in the car to head to Wal-mart to buy a new test. The store was out of all the digital ones, which made the decision to get a cheaper version a lot easier. I went with the "Answer" brand, which was about $12 for seven sticks.

This was when things started getting a little tricky because just like any infertile woman, I am crazy, and I imagine all kinds of things when I look at any kind of "pee on a stick" test. I see lines that are not there on pregnancy tests, and I immediately started seeing "almost" positives that do not exist on OPK's. I referred to the Pee on a Stick Web site multiple times to compare my tests and timelines to examples and photos of tests on the site. (This really is the best site ever, and it can really help ease any crazy person's mind about both pregnancy tests and OPK's.) At one point I got a test where the top part of the test line was kind of dark (not that dark) and the middle of the control line was kind of light (not that light). I was convinced that it could be positive since technically one part of the each line was the same color. So I went back to the Web site for comparison, and decided I was losing my mind when I saw the same image on a negative test example in the "odyssey" part of the site.

I was expecting to get the positive on Tuesday afternoon. It finally came on Saturday morning. By Thursday, with the new tests, I had started testing twice a day, and so I was at ease when I had a negative at 5 p.m. on Friday and got a clear positive at 9 a.m. on Saturday. I knew I had a good ideas of my ovulation window and that it was worth paying $220 (that I don't really have) to get the insemination done the next morning. (Of course, the next morning was a Sunday and Father's day, but that is another story.)

In all, I really liked using the OPK, and I am sad that I did not start using OPK's sooner because, although we have a physical problem that has prevented us from getting pregnant, there are probably a few months along the road where we have not even been in the running. A dear friend told me this same thing about herself when it took her 6 months to get pregnant with her second. She finally used OPK's and realized she had been missing the mark by several days each month. And let's be real ladies, after 5 days in a row... we are ready to say "Love you, Dear, but I will see you next month." We've probably stopped too early on several months. I could have at least given my man's sperm a fighting chance. Healthy sperm in a healthy vagina can live 5 days, but since we're not healthy, it probably would not have made a difference anyway. But I also loved the OPK's because as an infertile woman, I have grown found of "peeing on a stick," and this gave me a chance to have something to look forward to and a fair chance at least some kind of positive result.
Sources and other links:

Get basic information here:
Baby Center

For pictures of tests, candid information and frequently asked questions about the tests. Visit these sites:
Pee On a Stick
Fertility Plus

Learn more about the hormone that is measured by OPK's on Wikipedia.

Other information from this article comes from kit instructions and directions.

Neti Pot

What is a Neti Pot and
what is it used for?


The Jill Fellow Answer
Ok, so the concept of a Neti Pot has been in western pop culture recently because Oprah had an episode where Dr. Oz had a woman from the audience come and use a Neti Pot on the stage for her first time. (Read about the episode here.) The Neti Pot looks like Aladdin's lamp (or like a tea pot if you buy a plastic one). You take it and fill it with salt water. Then you pour the water into one nostril, and it comes out in a stream from the other nostril. It made Oprah's audience scream, but the women who did it came back on a few months later and said the daily practice had completely changed her life and relieved a lot of her sinus and allergy problems. Since this re-aired in 2007, it has been hard to find a Neti Pot in trendy areas of the country like Los Angeles, according to my sister Kristie Crvelin.

The concept of using the Neti Pot actually comes from the Yoga people. The practice is known as jala neti and is part of Ayurvedia techniques (more questions on that later, I guess.) The eastern practitioners of jala neti actually use the Neti Pot everyday as naturally as brushing their teeth according to wikipedia, the video linked below and other sites I read. I also read that the simple Neti Pot usage shown on Oprah and accepted in western culture is only part of the practice. People can go on to learn to snort and inhale the water and pass it in patterns from the mouth to the nose. These practices should be learned with a trained teacher.

In western cultures, we call the process Nasal Irrigation. Basically people who use Neti Pots -- Western or Eastern -- think they can cure many things relating to the throat, nose and mouth. They claim the salt pulls out blockages and dirt from the sinuses and nasal passage which could affect anything from sore throats to sinus infections to ear infections and so on.

Most Neti Pot instructions indicated that the pot should be filled with 8 oz. of distilled or filtered warm or home temperature water. There are solutions that can be bought to add to the water, or you can use non iodized salt. Experts disagree on the amount to use, but they all agree that salt must be added to the salter in some form or amount.

The Jill Fellow Experience

I got my first sinus infection and immediately turned to the internet for help with natural remedies. It did not take long to find a Neti Pot instructional video. I only had time to stop at one store on my way home from work the next day. I had no choice but to try a local Albertson's food store. I walked right up the pharmacist and asked him if they sell Neti Pots. He looked at me like I was crazy, but before I could walk away his assistant showed him that they had special ordered only one and kept it behind the counter. She scanned it to order another one and then sold it to be for about $15. It came with a plastic, blue Neti Pot and 50 salt mixture packets. The instructions were clear, and the pot was easy to use. The first time the did it, I looked up a little at my bathroom mirror to make sure it was actually coming out of my other nostril, and it was. I was scared of what would happen if I swallowed during the pouring, and I when I accidentally did, the water just slowed for a split second and was fine. When the water was done, I moved the pot and breathed out hard from both nostrils, and a ton of water flew out right away. The directions talked about blowing your nose carefully to avoid putting any pressure on your ears. I did not listen. I just blew my nose normally, and I had some ear pain afterwards because I think I had an ear infection as well. Whether you have ear pain or not, you should not blow your nose as you normally would. When we blow we tend to blow from one nostril at a time, and this is what adds pressure to the ears.

I believe that the fact that my ears were at all affected by this process is a sign that it can have an impact on many areas of the ears, nose and throat as users claims it does. The process definitely cleared my nasal passages and exposed some problems with my ears. When I did it twice in one day, I thought it dried out my nostrils, but that was no big deal to me. The second time I used the pot, I started the process and had to stop mid-flow because it was uncomfortable like water up your nose in the pool. I changed by position by leaning down closer to the sink, and that helped. But the process can be more or less comfortable based on what is going on in your nose I think. The cheap blue pots are the same price as the nice white ones, but the the cheap one I had was not very comfortable on my nostril because it had some sharp plastic edges. Some drug store kits include the white one, so look around or order it.

I highly recommend this practice for one main reason. Why not? A lot of people suffer from pain that doctors have no answers for. Take control of the situation and give this a try. Of all my reading online, no one mentioned a single side effect from just giving it a try.


Other sources and answers:
Search Nasal irrigation on wikipedia.org

Nasal irrigation can also be used with a syringe.

Here is a video demonstration from Youtube.com of how to use a Neti pot. (I followed the instructions from the video, and they worked well. Expect in the video she fills the pot with tap water and most sources say to use filtered or distilled water.)

Please comment with your answers and experiences.