Another gadget to add to your trying to conceive arsenal
Pros:
Inexpensive compared to OPKs (ovulation predictor kits).
Cons:
Not as accurate, instructions vague on some points.
The Bottom Line:
For the long term trying to conceive couple, this is another way to help pinpoint ovulation. not as easy to read or as accurate as ovulation predictor kits (OPKs).
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Overall Rating:
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Author's Review
I am somewhat of a ttc (that's trying to conceive) nut. I must be doing something right, because I have had seven pregnancies and six children to show for it!
After having problems getting pregnant with our third child, I went to my doctor, who introduced me to the world of charting my monthly cycles. A women goes through different detectable stages each cycle, and the Fertile-Focus Microscope's goal is to help a couple who's trying to get pregnant detect when the woman is about to ovulate.
It's easy enough to do: each morning, take a small drop of saliva and place it on the microscope's glass lens (an area about the size of a fingertip) and when it's dry, hold the lipstick sized tube shaped microscope up to an eye, hold the bottom button to turn on the green light, and look of a fern pattern. If it looks like just a bunch of dots and lines, with no pattern, the woman is not fertile. As her body approaches ovulation, a ferning pattern starts to be noticeable, until finally around the day of ovulation, a full ferning pattern appears. Once viewed, the lens can easily be rinsed off with water, and is ready for the next day.
The whole thing is less than 3 inches long, and resembles a tube of lipstick.
It does come with instructions that show pictures of what the ferning looks like, but they are in black and white. It takes a couple cycles to get the feel of what your personal body's ferning looks like.
This product does work well for some women in helping to pinpoint their fertile days, but it didn't work well for me.
Maybe breastfeeding makes the ferning irrelevant, but I got day after day of full ferning, proving the product useless in narrowing down my fertile times. Also, the instructions are vague at times. Exactly how am I supposed to get the saliva onto the slide? Should I brush my teeth first? It does say to not have recently eaten or drunk anything, making first thing in the morning a good time. Another issue I had was the drying time. The instructions say to view within 5 minutes, but my sample is still too wet then. I usually just leave it out to dry for several hours.
This can be a fun and less expensive addition to the more reliable OPK (ovulation predictor kits) sticks that give either a positive or negative result when used put in the woman's urine.
