Dad's Pregnant Too

Chapter 1: The First Few Weeks ... Shock, Joy, Surprise, and Things You'll Want to Do Tip #1: You can take a pregnancy test yourself, but only hers counts. THE STORY: The first four tests she took were all positive, but the indicator strips were extremely light. That's when I took a fifth test to act as a control test to make sure the results were accurate. She laughed at first but generally thought I was an idiot for doing so. She stood next to me as I took the test (she turned away when I peed). After dipping the stick, my wife watched as the indicator light revealed the results. As predicted, the results were a bright negative. For some reason, I had to test it. I just couldn't believe it. -Scott, daughter 23 months The lack of control begins with her urine. My wife hoarded her pee-she insisted it was too early to take a pregnancy test and refused to pee on a stick for me. I insisted that even though it was too early, taking a pregnancy test is too much fun to pass up. How many times in our life do we get to do this? I like to think of taking a pregnancy test like being on a game show without the game show music in the background (although next time I think I might play music during the test). The prize is that you get to have a baby (or two or three). I explained to her that it wasn't fair that she was hoarding her urine. She then explained that she didn't want to be disappointed if the test was negative like the previous month's round of testing. After explaining to her that a negative result is the most likely result, and that it would be too soon to be disappointed because it's so early, she yielded and reluctantly offered me some of her possibly pregnant urine. She then dipped the pregnancy test stick and we huddled around the urine-soaked magic wand. Pregnancy tests work by detecting the pregnancy hormone hCG. HCG begins to be produced when a fertilized egg implants in the uterus-about 6 days after conception-and then continues to increase during pregnancy. Most pregnancy tests give the most accurate results once hCG reaches high enough levels in the urine to be detected, about one week after a missed period. Early pregnancy tests can be used to tell if you're pregnant up to five days before a missed period. Once we dipped the stick and waited two minutes, we saw what appeared to be the faintest blue line. I bought a cheap test because...I can be cheap at times. The line was so faint it almost wasn't there. It definitely wasn't negative, but it was barely positive. We angled it, we put it under a bright light, dipped it in the urine cup on the counter-still, we thought the results were unclear. I then peed on one of the sticks to see if they were defective (surprisingly a number of guys do this). Fast forward 15 minutes, and I returned home from the drugstore with three deluxe digital home pregnancy tests. She peed again, we huddled again, and then, the word pregnant flashed on the screen. We took another test and it said not pregnant. She then took another digital test from a different manufacturer, and the results flashed pregnant. We figured two flashing pregnant sticks meant that she was really pregnant. I've heard that tests rarely ever give false positives. (hCG levels can vary from day to day, which can make someone have a positive test one day, and then a negative test the next.) So a positive result normally means that you can be pretty sure she is pregnant. My wife took another test with hermorning pee, and we were 100 percent positive. Four cheap tests and three digital tests later (a total of $75 worth of sticks), we finally believed she was pregnant. So much of pregnancy is about facing the unknown and accepting your lack of control. As a man, we don't even have control over the test-that's how little control we have from day one. But if you accept this fact and embrace the reality that you will experience an incredible amount of surprise duCohen, Harlan is the author of 'Dad's Pregnant Too', published 2008 under ISBN 9781402211331 and ISBN 1402211333.