Alright. Here’s the story, as I know it anyways. It doesnt quite sound right to me, so I igured I’d run it by you guys to see what you think.
Background: Sean is my best friend. I’ve known him for almost 5 years now, we tell each other everything. I adore him. He went to Palm Beach about 2 months ago, met a girl from Tennesee who was there for Spring Break. (He lives in Florida.) Got drunk, slept with her. Promised to keep in touch, have been talking via email and phone for the last few months. They’ve become very close. He thinks he’s falling in love with her.
Current: She went down to visit him this past two weeks. Apparently (this is where it starts to sound suspicious), the first week she was there, she got pregnant. The condom broke, and her birth control interacted with some medicine she was taking. Without going to the doctor or taking a test, she knew she was pregnant. I asked how, and he said because steffi’s one of those women who knows her body. and she knew she got pregnant. And for a few days after it happened, she was getting severe stomach cramps from her birth control. They also “felt it die”. She does energy work, like meditation, etc., and so she could feel something wrong in her. He had mentioned in the beginning that they werent worried about her being pregnant, because she had continued taking her birth control, and apparently there’s some hormone overdose in the last round of pills that induces a period. I was always under the impression that the only way to ‘correct’ a failed birth control was the morning after pill. Sean’s convinced she’s not lying at all, because he trusts her. I’m kinda thinking maybe she’s not lying, just misinformed, and in which case they could both be in for a big surprise later. I dont know what to tell him. In one hand, I dont want to ruin his chance at a good thing. In the other, I dont want to see him get hurt.
Does anyone have any knowledge on the subject? Is it possible to know you’re pregnant in the first week without being tested? Is there really a hormone overdose in birth control pills? Please help me out here…I’d hate to see him hurt, or surprised, if it could be avoided.
So I’m messing around in martial arts one day. Another classmate and I are wrestling while the instructor watches from afar. The guy I’m wrestling with grabs hold of my uniform and flips me over, landing on top of me. I hear a crack echoing through my body and my arm is on fire. I have no idea what’s wrong with it.
I assume I just bruised it. It’s not broken, I can still move it, but my motion is extremely limited. After struggling just to put on my shoes, I’m finally persuaded by my instructor that I really should get to the hospital to get this thing checked out.
So I go. It’s an hour or two later. The swelling’s increased, my motion is even more limited, I’m feeling nauseus just thinking about moving. Finally a nurse comes to check me out. After examining it a bit, she says “you’ve got a dislocated shoulder.”
I ask her “how can you tell?”
“Well, for starters, your shoulder blade is about five inches lower than it should be.”
I examined the area carefully for the first time. Well son of a gun! My shoulder blade WAS 5 inches lower than it should be. How in the world did I miss that? You’d think after 2+ decades of life I’d know where a shoulder blade was supposed to be, right?
My very stupid moral to this anecdote:
People don’t know their bodies as well as they think they do. Your friend’s friend won’t know she’s pregnant after just one week. Especially if she’s never been pregnant before. She hasn’t been pregnant before, has she?
Tell him to tell her to talk to a doctor before jumping to any conclusions.
My birthcontrol pills didn’t overdose you with hormones to bring on your period, the last round would stop the steady daily dose of hormones that keep a zygote from implanting. The sudden drop in hormones would cause the uterus to shed its lining. The collection of cells, slightly bigger than the head of a pin, would be undetectable: the heart hasn’t formed to start beating, what could she possibly feel ‘die’? Without a test, she couldn’t know if she was pregnant in a week. Maybe she was pregnant before she had sex with your friend and miscarried that fetus. It’s more likely to be 6 or 8 weeks late than 1 week late.
The last set of pills are sugar pills according to my gyno. All they do is keep you on your pill taking schedule.
But some people do know they’re pregnant that soon. I did because my tits were sore and the titty fairy always came early to the Ranger house, like in the first few days. Of course, if I hadn’t mentioned that to my mother the first time, I would have never even suspected for a few more weeks.
Actually, the pill keeps an ovum from being released, so there shouldn’t have been any zygote in the first place. And yes, those last few pills don’t contain any hormones, which makes you have your period.
With all due respect to your buddy, this chick sounds like a fruitcake. Tell him to high-tail it, quick!
You could suspect you were pregnant within a week, if you fell pregnant a week before your period is due to start, and doesn’t. But the only way to know is to take a test - drugstore ones are as good as those doctors use, as long as you follow the instuctions correctly.
Birth control pills would not make you miscarry, but if you continued taking them while pregnant with a male child, they could screw with his developing hormones. I doubt a miscarriage at that stage would cause any pain either, as there really isn’t much to miscarry. Women very often miscarry in the first week or two and don’t even realise it’s happened; they might have heavier blood loss, but that’s all. If this woman’s periods stop, or are much lighter than usual (some women still menstruate during pregnancy - not common, but it happens) she needs to get a pregnancy test pronto.
I have certainly heard from other moms that they knew much earlier than any test could tell them. I wasn’t one of them. I was slow to catch on. But anyway, I guess I believe the first part of this tale is possible.
I’m with Cranky. It took a while for me to realize I could be pregnant. Aside from being mildly nauseous and not wanting to eat, I had no clue. Any “female” symptoms felt like PMS. Then I threw up one morning and went to the doc ASAP.
She obviously wants to manipulate him. She’s desperate for attention. I had a friend in high school EXACTLY like this. She pulled the same crap, and then she had a ‘spontaeous abortion’ by sitting on the toilet thinking “I will not have this baby.” Well, at least that’s what she told me. :rolleyes:
Tell him to get out of this as fast as he can. There is no healthy way for this relationship to exist.
I suspected within the first two weeks with my first pregnancy .Before my period was even due (and therefore too early to take a home test) my bras turned into instruments of torture.Between having the test done (a blood test, if I remember correctly) and getting the results, I thought my period had started (just a day or two late). The test results were positive, so I figured it was one of those very early miscarriages that QueenAl referred to. I kept the obstetrician appointment anyway. I was still pregnant. Steffi definitely should have a test done. If she was right about “knowing” she was pregnant, and even about “feeling something wrong with her”,it doesn’t follow that she was necessarily also right about “feeling it die”.
Also, doesn’t it take about 6-10 days for the fertilized egg to implant in the uterus? She knew a WEEK after having sex? That’s a chick in tune with her body.
I think most people who believe that they can tell when they are pregnant are probably engaging in wishful thinking and something like the “full moon syndrome”, i.e. they forget or don’t notice when they are wrong, but make a big deal out of it when they are right.
And my apologies to Arden, but even you didn’t have that mystic “I just know I’m pregnant” that this flake is claiming. You had a change in how your body worked and deduced (correctly in this instance) that you were pregnant. But it could have easily been that your body just changed - my PMS has changed dozens of time over the years.
IANAD (yet), but as far as I know, there are a few things wrong with Steffi’s story:
Very few medications interfere with the contraceptive pill (a few penicillin-type antibiotics, and not much else). Doctors somtimes err on the side of caution in advising women to use extra protection when they’re on antibiotics.
While some women say that they know they are pregnant instinctively from the time of conception, implantation doesn’t actually happen until about day 7, and the mother’s body doesn’t really react (physiologically) until then. So it’s pretty unlikely. Similarly, being able to “feel it die” so early on seems a bit dodgy. Many embryos abort spontaneously within the first week or two of development, and the women never know they are pregnant.
There’s no increased dose of pills in the last phase of the pack (although some of the biphasic or triphasic pills might have a slight increase); the reason a woman has a period is that she stops taking pills for a week (or, if she takes them, they contain sugar and no hormones).
Taking the pill when you are pregnant is unlikely to induce an abortion, however it may harm the developing embryo. The morning after pill needs to be taken within 72 hours of unsafe sex to be effective, and it contains much higher doses of hormones than a normal contraceptive pill.
So, all in all, what I’m saying is that the story sounds a little dodgy, and Steffi should get tested asap. IIRC, blood tests are more reliable than urine tests early in pregnancy.
I knew when I got pregnant. But it wasn’t that I was so in tune with my body, it was just that I knew having sex without protection causes babies. I just knew I had to be pregnant, and I was right. Yay!
I seriously doubt that a woman who doesn’t even know how her birth control works would know that she is pregnant without a test.
And how did she know that her pills reacted to some other medication? Did she suddenly find out a few days after sex, or did she already know? That sounds very fishy to me.
The morning after pill is essentially just a larger dose of birth control pills. The progestin in BCP prevents ovulation, but it also inhibits implantation.
The others are right, though. The last round of pills contains no hormones at all and that is what induces a period. They should not have interfered with the pregnancy. But IANAD.
Just a minor nitpick, the MAP is most effective within 72hrs, there is evidence to suggest that it may be effective (at a lesser % rate) for up to a week. But the first 72 hrs is certainly optimal and recommended. Other posters have all the bases covered already, but while it’s possible to know, I’d strongly advise testing ASAP.