asked my gp for estradiol and progesterone pulled on cycle day 24 this time, not just whenever i happened to have an appointment. wanted to actually catch the drop instead of guessing at it from symptoms after the fact. estradiol was already down more than i expected by day 24, and my migraine calendar says the attack hit day 26, not day 1 of my period like i always assumed. so the window i’ve been syncing my whole life to is wrong, or at least it’s wrong for me.
the actual trigger point, if it is the trigger, sits two days earlier than the bleeding does. problem is progesterone drops at almost the exact same time as estradiol in the luteal phase, so one blood draw can’t tell me which one is doing the work, or if it’s the ratio between them, or the rate of the drop rather than the level itself. i can’t isolate it from a single lab day any more than i could separate wine from bad sleep in my trigger log. started temping in the mornings to see if a BBT dip shows up before i feel anything, thinking maybe that gives me a day of lead time i don’t currently have.
two cycles in, dip showed up the morning before onset both times, which is something, but two cycles isn’t a pattern yet, it’s a guess wearing a lab coat. has anyone actually gotten hormone levels drawn on a specific cycle day tied to their migraine calendar, not just a random annual panel? and did BBT or OPK strips end up giving you real lead time, or was it noise once you had more cycles logged?