Fun with sharpies and cardboard

Here are the lengths to which I have been driven:
What you see here is a visual representation of the various possible lifespans of frozen, thawed sperm and that of a healthy egg. Conveniently, the eggs and sperm can be moved across the timeline (representing hours post LH surge) to help show how it may be possible to get pregnant in what, hypothetically, seems like an improbably small amount of time spent in the same vicinity.

I did this because, well, come on… it’s the pre-insem week and I am going nuts. The possibly less obvious reason is that I am a math moron and can’t conceptualize more than two variables at once. Even wtih paper, the math involved in figuring out timing for the LH surge, the ovulating and the inseminating were all getting to be a bit much.

So, while looking silly and not being a particularly scientific method, my little cardboard helpers are serving to calm me this evening.

For example, I now know that…
if I were to surge at 10 o’clock tonight and my ovulation happened at 24 hours past LH surge and I insemmed at ten am Thursday and my egg lived 24 hours and the sperm lived 8 hours, then there would be a full eight hour window for conception.

You see why I needed visual aids?