I bought the 40-count bag of Pregmate pregnancy test strips on Amazon. The Babycenter community boards, where getting pregnant is a hot topic of discussion, said to use FMU (first morning urine) because it’s undiluted, so I always took a test when I woke up. But inevitably, I drank water and ate breakfast, and tested again.
Sometimes I tested three times a day, lining up the inch-long sticks on my desk and comparing the results. I held them under my desk lamp and shined my phone’s flashlight on them. And when I stopped trusting my own eyes, I took pictures of the tests and posted them on the Pregnancy Test Checker app.
Pregnancy tests are marketed as easy to read, but for self-proclaimed POAS (pee on a stick) addicts, like I once was, there’s a name for when you lose the ability to accurately read a pregnancy test: It’s called “line eyes.” It happens when you’ve been staring at plastic sticks so long, you start to see positive results on every test.
I can’t recall anymore how I even came across it, but discovering the anonymous community of the Pregnancy Test Checker app was like walking out a dark forest into a patch of sunlight.
The app consists of a simple column of tiles that you can continuously refresh. Users upload a photo of their tests, changing the photo to grayscale or turning up the contrast, in order to reveal even a hint of a positive line. Below each photo are plus and minus buttons that let users vote on the results of the displayed pregnancy tests.
People who want to become parents use the app to get opinions on their own test results from other people who also spend all day looking at plastic sticks. Yet somehow it became a life raft for me in the midst of what I would come to find out was an early miscarriage.
I started using it in November 2020. My partner and I had only been trying to get pregnant for a month. At the end of my first ovulation cycle, I read that I had to wait two weeks until the start of my period before I could take a pregnancy test. I made it one week before I opened the box of Pregmate tests. When a faint second line popped up on the thin plastic stick, I felt a jolt of exhilaration mixed with disbelief.
My partner came home from work, and we studied the test under the bright lights in our kitchen.
We tried to keep a collective cool head. Anywhere from 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, but the number is probably much higher because there are so many early miscarriages that happen before…
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