You can’t control whether you get pregnant or not.

What you CAN control to a big extent are your ODDS of getting pregnant. Understanding his simple distinction can go a long towards giving you a better grasp of your situation and hopefully a better sense of control on the whole big picture. For example, next month if you make the decision to stay celibate and never have sex, then you can effectively eliminate any chance of getting pregnant. The last time someone gave birth without ever having sex actually happened around this time of year. But unless you tell me that you were just paid a visit by three wise men from the East bearing gifts of gold, frankincence and myrrh, then this probably isn’t going to happen to you.

Taking this further, if you end up having sex randomly twice this month, then you might have a chance of having a baby, but it will be low. Furthermore, if you have sex at an exact day, planned by using ovulation tests and past temperature charts, or better yet, if you have sex every two days for the whole month, then your chances get even better.

Now, taking this further, if you can somehow quadruple your egg production and then on the day of ovulation (or better yet, near the HOUR of ovulation) arrange to have 20 million of your husbands live sperm delivered right to the doorstep of where your eggs should be waiting, then your odds get better yet.

Ultimately, if you instead arrange to have your eggs found and retrieved, directly fertilized and then transplanted back into a hormonally-enriched uterus, then your odds are the best.

I think you can see the point. Choices you make, whether on the type of treatment you get in a certain month, the frequency of sex, what you eat, how much stress you have, how healthy you make yourself all can have some bearing on your odds of getting pregnant. The unfortunate thing to accept is that you can do all the right things to maximize your odds, but still not get pregnant in a given month. In basketball, your team can work hard moving the ball around and making passes to get the ball set up for a super easy shot and still fail to score because that easy shot is missed. On the other hand, you can also just fling the ball from half-court without a prayer of it going on, and most of the time it won’t, BUT, once in a blue moon, it WILL. In the first case, even if you miss the easy shot one time, as long you continue to do the right thing to set up easy shots subsequent months, eventually one will go in.

So if you have been reading this site from the beginning, you now know two important basics of fertility strategy.

• Try something.
• If time goes by and that particular something is not working, try something different.
• When trying something different, focus on doing things that are expected to improve your odds. If your odds were truly improved by your new action, then eventually it will work.
• If it doesn’t work, then it means that your odds weren’t truly improved enough by your particular choice of different action, so then try something else!

This is the basic outline of our gameplan. There are many specific ways of how we can medically and naturally increase those odds, but those are lessons for another day.