I can begin by saying one thing, when a women decides it is time to get pregnant she will go to great lengths in order for it to happen. That is how our story started. When trying for a baby with my husband, Hrvoje, I thought it would be easy. When it did not happen quickly I became anxious and started to read more about it, to ask around and try to get some solid advice. First I learned a lot more about a women’s menstrual cycle. I used to think it was simple, like they say in the books, a women’s cycle is 28 days long and on the 14th day a women releases an egg – ovulates. If there was unprotected sex, with a healthy male, during that time the egg is fertilized and a women is officially pregnantan. Simple, right? WRONG! I came to see it is so much more complicated.

Every women’s body is so different. We each have different cycles, ovulate on different days in the cycle, sometime ovulate a few times in a cycle, sometimes not even once. Some women have shorter cycles, some have longer, some have excessive beading, some not so much. Sometimes it a sign of something being wrong but most of the time it is just completely normal for that particular women. This is why “out of the text book” calculations do not work in the real world, we need something more accurate.

Continuing my search I found out the the market offers a few solutions to accurately determine my actual ovulation day. You can visit the doctor and get a blood test, you can mesure your vaginal temperature, then there is litmus paper urine test and finally there are product that use your saliva to determine the presence of ones Luteinizing hormone. What is Luteinizing hormone and how does this work you might ask? Luteinizing hormone is, as I found out, a hormon produced by gonadotropic cells in the anterior pituitary gland that triggers ovulation. This means that when this hormone is present in your body it is a good sign that ovulation is on it’s way or happening right now. You can determine its presence by looking for mold like shapes in your saliva.

So, I got my self one of those products. Quite simple I thought, you put some saliva on a small magnifying glass and look for mold particles. Then you catalog and input your data into whatever mobile application you are using to track your cycles. Right away I thought it would be so cool if I could somehow do this automatically, that the devise would communicate with my phone and update my results by it self. I told this to my husband, who of course understood nothing at first. I had to explain all of the above to him and he almost instantly, being already a successful entrepreneur, saw this as a great business idea. We decided it was something worthy of investing some time and money in, and so we did. The rest is going to be written in the history books!

me.mum: a new method for predicting fertility