My app: iperiod & taking charge of your fertility

Yes you herd me. iperiod.

**DISCLAIMER** Below is talk of contraception and menstrual cycles. If this doesn't interest you, stop reading now.

My cycle has always been *what I thought was* irregular. The only time you could set a watch to my cycle was the years I was on the pill in college. Now I am not really an advocate of synthetic hormones in my body but It was the right decision for me at the time. The last thing I wanted to do was get pregnant in the middle of nursing school.

After I got married I decided to get off the pill, not because I wanted to get pregnant, but I was just sick of taking them all the time & they were started to raise my blood pressure a little bit (which is one of the main factors which puts you at risk for DVTs, MIs and Strokes). Now my husband and I are using other methods of contraception and I have started to track my cycles regularly.

When my husband is actually home I am a lot more diligent about checking my temperature in the mornings but when he's gone and my chance of getting pregnant is 0% I get lazy lol. I use the method found in Taking Charge of Your Fertility, 10th Anniversary Edition which I would recommend to EVERYONE. Seriously if you're a woman, do yourself a favor and read this book. It fills in all the gaps that you mom never told you and you didn't pay attention to in high school health class. Even being in the medical profession I was surprised about how ignorant I was about my own body! Pick it up, I got mine from the library, read it once, then bought two copies. One for me and one for my friend as a wedding present. She used the method to get pregnant and was successful pretty much right out of the gate. What's great about the book is that it focuses on contraception as much as pregnancy achievement.

So anyway on to the application. I started out tracking on paper but I would always want to know when my next period was due, especially since it changes a little bit from month to month. This application averages your periods together to predict your next cycle and it's pretty accurate (at least for me). This was actually recommended to be by one of my patients! I always ask women of child bearing age when their last period was in the ED and this one girl pulled out her phone and told me in two seconds the exact day her period started. I was pretty impressed especially since at that time I wouldn't have been able to tell you when my last period was if my life depended on it.

My phone. The app is "iP" located in the bottom row

Once you open the app you plug in some basic info and you input your last several periods. The more periods you put in the more acurate the predictions become. I also enjoy the ability to input the symptoms your having and your moods on certain days. I get a certain pleasure from saying, yeah I'm totally stressed out today or yeah I for the last three months I get really tired two days before my period starts, interesting.

Left: Home screen. See how long my cycles are? Around 38-40 days is NORMAL for me! Right: Calendar. You can see all the smiley faces showing my moods. The pink shows my period week. The green is an estimate of my most fertile days of the month with the dark green being my estimated ovulation day.

Anyway guys that's the short version of this app and why I like it. I haven't been using it to chart my basal body temp but I will start using it for that once Kyle comes back. Hope this was helpful to some of you ladies who are looking for more of a solution to knowing when in the heck your next period is going to be ;-)



Until next time!