Contraception is a sophisticated thing these days. From the pill, to coils, injections, implants or just the good old natural cycle method, you stand a pretty good chance of preventing pregnancy if that’s what you want. It’s normal to change your method of contraception at different stages of your life, depending on your circumstances and personal preference. Such as when you get together with a new partner, or you’re certain that your baby-making days are done, so if you’re thinking of changing your contraception, it’s pretty important to establish if you might be pregnant first.
There are all manner of pregnancy tests on the market. From the standard ones to be used after a missed period, to early response ones that can be used up to 6 DAYS before a period. It’s a far cry from the days of send-off-in-the-post pregnancy test kits which were only accurate if you’d missed at least two periods. These days, impatience for answers is common and usually served by Google with its 0.7678 second response time to questions, but that’s not going to work for pregnancy. Even medicine doesn’t always have all of the answers. You can have the most sophisticated pregnancy test available, but sometimes the only thing that can give us conclusive answers are our bodies – if you know the signs to look for. A missed period is an obvious one, but sometimes there are women who don’t track their cycles and who don’t realise that they’re late. So if you’re wondering if you might be pregnant, here are some signs and symptoms that could help you decide.
- Persistent sickness or nausea. Usually labelled ‘morning sickness’, pregnancy hormones can indeed make women feel anything from slightly nauseous to causing full-on vomiting. If you feel sick for a couple of days and then it goes away it’s probably not down to pregnancy. But you don’t need to be throwing up day and night constantly to be pregnant, sometimes there’s just a low level nausea that never quite goes away.
- Tiredness. A woman’s body creates an actual, new human in just 40 weeks. Or 38, to be exact. That’s a heck of a lot of work. And it’s got to keep functioning as an ordinary body in the meantime. So you can imagine that’s pretty tiring, which is why excessive tiredness can be a sign of pregnancy. You might be needing a little nap every day, or you might be experiencing bone-shattering exhaustion. Anything that’s different from your norm could be a sign.
- Food aversion. This normally goes hand in
hand with the sickness bit of pregnancy. You might suddenly hate coffee, or not
be able to stand the smell of cheese, or be unable to stomach your previously
loved favourite meal. Or feel like vomiting the moment you open the fridge. If
you had boxes to tick, this could well be one.
- Feeling very emotional. If you start
crying at the drop of a hat when you’re normally dry eyed even at the very
hardest of life’s moments then it could be a clue. If you’re going through a
particularly difficult patch that’s taking its toll on you, being overly
emotional is a perfectly normal response. But if it goes hand in hand with other
signs of pregnancy then you should probably look at it as one.
- A sudden metallic taste in your
mouth that can’t be accounted for. This happens to some women and not others. Dysgeusia, or a change in your sense
of taste, during pregnancy is probably caused by those pesky, pregnancy
hormones.
- Sore, swollen breasts. To the point that if anything touches them, however lightly, it’s incredibly painful. You might even have to switch up a bra size or two. In fact, this is the one of the most common symptoms of early pregnancy, though for some women it’s normal to have sore breasts at various stages of their menstrual cycle.
So basically, if you’re looking at re-thinking your contraception, you should find out for sure that you aren’t with child before you do change. The chances are that a standard test from a supermarket should tell you one way or another, but it also might not. You should bear in mind as well that false negatives are reasonably common, they usually happen because there isn’t enough of the pregnancy hormone in your system yet to register on a test. So if you test negative but still don’t have your period, or experience suspicious sounding symptoms, then wait a few days and test again.
Once you’ve ruled out pregnancy one way or another, then you’re good to go on your contraception! And goodness, you have a lot of choice here if a baby doesn’t feature in your life right now. Browse through, take your time, and choose what works for you. And don’t forget the little extras too, sometimes they can make all the difference…….
