HOOKS EFFECT IS REAL

Hi everyone! Unfortunately, I suffer from chronic testing. I’m 7 weeks 4 days today and decided to test for the first time in a while. HUGE MISTAKE on my end because my test came up BARELY positive (Top Pregmate test). I did what any rational person would do and added two boxes of first response tests to a Target pickup order and ran there to get it as soon as it was ready for pick up.

In the meantime, I contacted my midwife, scheduled an ultrasound, AND browsed Tik Tok for all the answers until I came across this thing called the ‘Hooks Effect’. It essentially means that your body has loads amounts of HCG and it glitches out the pregnancy test into producing a faint positive or even sometimes a false negative test. I was encouraged to dilute my urine sample with water to see if I was in fact experiencing this or if something worse was happening.

So, that’s what I did. I peed in a cup and diluted the sample with a bunch of water and tested it again and my tests came back super positive (bottom highlighted Pregmate and highlighted first response).

I wanted to put this out here because I know I’m not the only chronic tester / worrier when it comes to being pregnant and I hope that someone else doesn’t experience the sense of pain and fear I did this morning thinking we might have lost our final addition all over a false pregnancy test. IF you do decide to test this late in your pregnancy like me and get a faint positive, please dilute your sample and test again before thinking the worst!

Either way, I have an ultrasound Monday and get to see little babe again just for secondary reassurance and learned something new today.. so there’s that.

I hope everyone is feeling wonderful and well. 🩵