Undergoing a pregnancy is one of the highlights of any woman's life and, despite the fact that the nine months preceding the actual birth of the child can be quite traumatic - what with all the changes taking place within the mothers body, the end result is always very fulfilling as you welcome another human being into the world. While getting to know your pregnant could initially spark very varied reactions, most people tend to find out much later down the line that they are pregnant. The majority of cases will only realize that they are pregnant when the mother realizes that she has not had her period. By this time, the pregnancy is usually already a couple of weeks underway. The fact is that any symptoms that emerge will do so after the fertilized egg has been able to attach itself onto the uterine wall. This will usually take a few days from the date of conception. Understanding the various symptoms of pregnancy will help you identify the condition much earlier and therefore prepare you for the fact that your body is going to undergo some very serious and intense changes over the course of the better part of the following year.
As mentioned previously, one of the most significant and important early signs and symptoms of pregnancy is the missing of a period, another very common one happens to be morning sickness. The nausea will usually tend to creep into your daily routine a couple of weeks before you actually realize that you are pregnant and, in the event that it develops into a full blown case of morning sickness, chances are that it will be one of the worst parts of your pregnancy. One way of dealing with these bouts of morning sickness is to eat a few crackers before getting out of the bed in the morning and before you experience any other symptom develop. You should also try cutting down on your intake of food from three large meals over the course of the day to 6 smaller meals spread over the day. Another one of the more prominent early signs and symptoms of pregnancy happen to be the tender, swollen breasts.
Because of the fact that your body is likely to be sending you a number of mixed signals in the initial phase of the pregnancy, you may want to perform a home pregnancy test in order to find out for yourself if you are pregnant. You can purchase one of these test kits from your local medical store. Though the accuracy of home pregnancy tests cannot be relied upon completely one could use this as the first checker for pregnancy. The home pregnancy test is normally conducted by testing the urine for the presence of the hormone. This urine pregnancy test accuracy depends on their ability to measure a hormone known as human chorionuc gonadotropin (hCG) that is present in the woman's urine. However, it is important to remember that these home pregnancy tests are known to give a few wrong diagnoses and lead to a number of false positives as well as false negatives and therefore should not be trusted completely. The better and more accurate pregnancy tests are performed in a medical center or clinic and, just like with any blood test, will require a sample of your blood to be extracted and sent to the laboratory for analysis. One aspect of the home pregnancy kits that one should keep in mind is the fact that the hormone hCG will usually take a couple of weeks to show up and any tests before that are likely to reflect in the negative even if the woman is actually pregnant.
answered by M W