Confirming Your Pregnancy With Your Doctor or Midwife
Once your doctor or midwife confirms your pregnancy (hello, baby!), she will want to conduct a urine or blood test.
The urine test you take at the doctor's office is virtually identical to at-home pregnancy tests. You can urinate directly on the test stick or dip the test into a sample of urine. If your doctor wants you to provide a sample of first-thing-in-the-morning urine, store it at room temperature.
The blood test you'll take to confirm pregnancy can be either qualitative (it will give you a "yes/no" answer as to whether you are pregnant) or quantitative (it estimates how long you've been pregnant and provides your doctor with a reading of the level of human chorionic gonadotropin [hCG] in your blood).
Your doctor or midwife is more likely to take a quantitative blood test if she believes that your pregnancy could be in danger, if you've had first-trimester miscarriages in the past, if ectopic pregnancy could be an issue, or if she plans to put you on progesterone in an effort to prevent you a miscarriage.
Your doctor or midwife may perform a series of these tests to check that the hCG levels are rising appropriately (doubling every 48 hours) and that your pregnancy is a healthy, intrauterine pregnancy. The series of tests is known as serial beta-hCG tests or repeat quantitative hCG tests.
hCG can be detected in the blood of approximately 5 percent of pregnant women eight days after conception and in the blood of 98 percent of pregnant women by day 11.
report abuse
Submit!
