The first three months were uneventful. Right off the bat, I had a good friend (and this is how you know you have a good friend) from America sent me a bag of OPK ovulation predictor kits for my 31st birthday. These are thin little paper pee sticks that tell you when your Lutenizing Hormone (LH) is surging, which is then an indicator that you will ovulate in 12–36 hours.
It is both frustratingly exact and frustratingly inexact.
The first time I used them, I started testing, as the website suggested, on Day 11 (Day 1 being the first day of your period). As it turned out, I am really regular, the sticks are negative, negative, negative, then bang, positive on Day 15. The real question, unfortunately, is figuring out when the ovulation occurs after that, and also, when exactly is ovulation over? When should you just stop trying because the window has closed? Is it 12 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours, or the odd 72 hours? And what are you doing for those hours in between? How many eating, how many sleeping, how many working? In case you try to figure that out from the pee sticks, the timing in which they turn positive is usually only 12 hours and in that period, you will probably drive yourself mad peeing and sticking.
My experience is that this obsession with your own ovulation is one of the least gratifying things in the world and it makes trying less romantic and spontaneous after a while; in fact, it makes trying every 12, 24, or 36 hours somewhat tedious.
The only thing even less gratifying is testing for pregnancy, or the HCG hormone test (also a pee stick) that you can take 7–10 days after ovulation. Before that period, you may not have accumulated enough HCG in your bloodstream and urine to trigger the test.
If you are like me, you will vow up and down not to test and then crack at some point before Day 7, then test, then wonder if it was negative because you hadn't waited long enough and then wait on the cusp of excitement and pessimism for Day 10, then feel disappointed that it was of course, negative, negative, negative. Bang on time, in 28–30 day cycles, would come the bloating, and then the bleeding of a period. Game over, restart.
By month 3, I'd taken recommendations from friends who'd had fertility treatments and sought out a gynaecologist with a specialty in infertility. Why? To give myself peace of mind, in the worst case scenario. I know, I'm just a realist like that. But not for no good reason. As it turned out, unbeknownst to me, in the same 3-month window, the family we had stayed with while on vacation in the second month had fallen pregnant. The couple whose wedding we attended during one of those months was also now pregnant, my cousin and best friends in Singapore and in New York had become pregnant after trying "for a month", even the caterer from our wedding was pregnant. It was almost gory to think of the sex taking place all around us, most of it apparently hitting the mark. And there we were, still on the very first hurdle of pee sticks.
