Am I Pregnant? The Earliest Pregnancy Symptoms During the Two Week Wait (and After)
Though some early symptoms may indicate pregnancy, a positive pregnancy test and missed period are the most reliable. (Photo: Kelly Knox/Stocksy)
For women trying to get pregnant, waiting until you’ve missed a period to take a test can feel like torture. But trying to detect early pregnancy symptoms can be a tease, too. I remember when I was trying — slogging through the “two week wait” between possible conception and positive pregnancy test – and spent plenty of time scanning my body for signs. I was tired, which I’d read was a pregnancy indicator, but I was also working, exercising, obsessing about getting pregnant – all of which was exhausting – so was it a pregnancy sign or just life catching up with me? I’d poke my boobs to see if they were tender, and then they were, but was it early pregnancy breast tenderness or a result of poking my chest too hard?
STORY: Woman Who Gave Birth on Plane Didn’t Know She Was Pregnant
I’ve heard people say that they “just knew” they were pregnant, almost immediately. They felt differently, they’d say, the day after conception. Dr. Gil Weiss, assistant professor of clinical medicine at Northwestern University and an ob-gyn in Chicago, says he’s heard patients say that, too, but it can be hard to believe. “I know, physiologically, that it can be really challenging to recognize what those patients say they are recognizing,” he tells Yahoo Parenting. “The whole process of getting pregnant takes a while. Fertilization happens in the fallopian tube, the egg travels down and implants in the uterus, the placenta starts to grow — the whole thing can take a week to 10 days.”
But Weiss says he doesn’t rule out the possibility that some people have a sixth sense for their own pregnancies. “I believe people have different thresholds for hormone changes in their bodies, so if yours is lower maybe you feel it before most people,” he says. “Or maybe some people know their bodies better than science does, it’s possible.”
STORY: What Most People Don’t Know About Miscarriages
So are there any surefire early signs of pregnancy? “It’s a hard question to answer because there are some people who are going to say they feel symptoms right away and happen to be pregnant, and then people who feel them who aren’t pregnant. And there are people who don’t feel them and are pregnant,” Dr. Teri Benn, an OB-GYN at FemCare OB-GYN in Miami, tells Yahoo Parenting. “Plus, there are a lot of symptoms that are associated with pregnancy but can be associated with a lot of other things as well.”
Still, both doctors point to three symptoms that are most likely to come up early in a pregnancy: Fatigue, breast tenderness, and increased sense of smell. “The sense of smell is most interesting to me – it can be really pronounced,” Weiss says. “I had a patient once who said ‘I can smell bacon two floors down, and I’m a vegetarian.’”
Other early symptoms might be nausea, headaches, cramping, and even light bleeding. “The symptoms are so vague,” Weiss says. “Nausea and vomiting are classic, but some people don’t get nauseous at all. In medical school, we learn that the earliest sign can be implantation bleeding – light spotting that occurs when the embryo implants – and that can cause some cramping, too.”
Most of these symptoms are associated with an increase in estrogen, progesterone and HCG, also known as “the pregnancy hormone,” Benn says. “But if you don’t have them, it’s not to say you aren’t pregnant.” And if you do, they could just be indicators that your period is coming.
The most reliable way to be sure if you’re pregnant, Benn says, is a blood test, which can detect a pregnancy more definitively than a urine test. Women who are trying to get pregnant should try to be patient, and wait until they’ve missed a period and gotten a positive pregnancy test. Then, call the doctor for a blood test to confirm. “Otherwise you will drive yourself crazy looking for symptoms that may or may not show,” she says.
It’s the same reason that some women are unaware of their pregnancies for a long time. “They think ‘I was tired, I thought I was working too much,’” Weiss says. “When it comes to looking for pregnancy symptoms, there is nothing that says a +b = c. It’s a constellation of small things that are happening at once.”
Please follow @YahooParenting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. Have an interesting story to share about your family? Email us at YParenting (at) Yahoo.com.
