Back to 2011, and having charted for a few months, the inkling that my luteal phase may be a bit short was something I hadn’t yet voiced. First things first, I decided I should visit the GP as we had not become pregnant and it had been over a year. At this point I was 32.

I was promptly sent off for a ‘day 21’ blood test, designed to check that the levels of progesterone in the second half of your cycle are at the normal level post-ovulation. This is a bit of a hit and miss science in my opinion because unless women know specifically when they ovulate or are already being monitored, not everyone is guaranteed to be at the correct point in their cycle on day 21, which should be a week post-ovulation. Some women may ovulate late in their cycle for instance. Basically not everyone has a 28 day cycle (how inconsiderate of us) so it is important that you have as much insight into your own cycles as you are able to avoid the ‘one-size fits all’ nature of most medical processes when it comes to women’s health.

Anyway, I’m waffling a bit but the outcome was that I tried to time my blood test correctly and it did happen to fall roughly on day 21 that cycle. Between the test and the results coming back though, we happily discovered that I was pregnant for the first time. The test results were then forgotten as we had obviously proved we could conceive. When we revisited those test results later down the line, they did however show a problem with low progesterone, especially in a cycle where it turned out I was pregnant…

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