Are you asking yourself how to read a pregnancy test? Well, most people would think that reading a pregnancy test is as easy as following the instructions on the box. In most cases, you would be right, however, as some of you would know, waiting to see if you are pregnant or not can be a very stressful period in a woman’s life. Women who have been planning to have a baby may be impatient in waiting for a result and made see “lines” that may not necessarily mean they are pregnant. The same can happen for women who have not planned to have a child, dismissing lines that made be “faded” or “faint” as a sign they are not.
So how to read a pregnancy test, and even more important – how do you make sure that you are reading the pregnancy test right? Well, the first place to start can be as simple as rereading the instructions on the box and making sure you know exactly what they want you to do. Make sure you have urinated on the stick, or held the stick in your urine, for the amount of time they specified on the box (usually a few seconds). If there is not enough urine on the test to begin with you may get a false negative.
Another thing to remember is that the window that they give you to read the test is not just a guidelines, it is something you NEED to follow. The reason for this is that reading the results window too early may show you a “faded” or “faint” line that you may not consider dark enough to prove that you are pregnant. Also reading after the designated time zone may show you a result window that is blank, but minutes ago could have had a thick and dark blue or pink line indicating you are pregnant. Some tests even have an evaporation line that can show after designated time zone that may make you seem like you are pregnant when you are not.
The point of this entry is to make sure that you know that how to read a pregnancy test is based on what is on the box of pregnancy test and that you know the instructions are not just guidelines to what you should do, it is what you NEED to do to get the most accurate results possible.