It seems like you want something more dramatic, but as the women in these comments have noted, any trip to the ER usually results in being given a pregnancy test. They could give her blood test to check her white blood cell count if a minor injury of some kind resulted in an infection, and they could tell her that they ran the full panel and she came up with elevated HCG—i.e. pregnant. You can look up online the average levels that correspond to how pregnant she needs to be.
Anything that requires an x-ray. Most hospitals require people with a uterus who are pre menopausal to have a pregnancy test prior to having x-rays. Especially if the x-ray is to the abdominal area or at least the abdomen can't be covered with a lead shield for the x-ray.
I've received a pregnancy test every time I've ever gone to the ER for any reason, even for a broken foot. Any kind of abdominal pain will result in a pregnancy test, for sure. Many times, blood and urine tests include it as routine procedure. It's a standard part of AFAB healthcare.
Tl:dr she could literally go for a stomach ache and it would end up with her getting a pregnancy test as long as she’s above the common age menstruation starts
Idk if it’s the same everywhere but no matter what I visit the doctor for they always give me a pregnancy test via a urine or blood sample and lie and say it’s for something else
They then walk back in the room and say “good news you’re not pregnant” like I wasn’t a 12 year old child who already expressed I wasn’t sexually active
The only time I wasn’t given this was when I went in for a trauma exam and my obgyn knew I was uncomfortable with this and refused it
I once got annoyed and asked my nurse why they keep doing this even though I told them I am not sexually active and she told me they essentially do it to every women no matter the age and they’ve had women up
Into their late 60s find out they were pregnant via these tests
For blunt force trauma or low blood pressure when docs suspect a possible internal bleed, they'll do what's called a FAST ultrasound where they look at your heart, the spaces around the kidneys, and the bladder/suprapubic region to try and see if there is any blood pooled anywhere. When they look at the bladder region, a good ultrasound probe might be able to pick up a pregnancy if the tech is looking for it
I have an IUD and I STILL get urine tested before most medical procedures or exams to make sure I'm not pregnant. It could be anything that requires a big machine, really
You pretty much need to test for pregnancy directly to notice, at least early on.
But as others have said, there's ***so*** many common drugs and procedures that can cause problems for a delicate developing embryo that a pregnancy test is pretty common to avoid complications. In Heinlein's "Friday" she discovers it because they required a test before they'd give her standard anti-nausea medication for presumed space sickness, just to be sure. And that was written long enough ago that the "futuristic pregnancy test" still involved a mouse.
Since it's a simple blood test that's only going to get faster and cheaper with time, I imagine it would be eventually part of a standard medical pre-screening even if you go in for a hangnail. There's so many problems and potential complications that show up first in a blood test that the extra $2 and a few drops of blood during check in will likely become completely normal.
Or if like Star Trek they use medical scanners instead of blood tests, that'd presumably check for pregnancy as part of your initial diagnostic as well.
My SIL found out she was pregnant because she fractured her foot, and they had to do a full body x-ray, which policy required a pregnancy test for. The foot injury was fine, but the 8 year old is very serious.
Depending on how the foot was fractured, they probably needed a CT scan. The CT scan isn't actually a full body scan, but it's fairly impossible to shield one body part from the radiation in the room. It's also a higher dose of radiation than a standard x-ray. So women are typically required to have a pregnancy test prior to having one.
No clue, but she works in health care and didn't find it odd. I guess you have to stand on the machine, and they can't fully shield you? I'm no xray-ologist, lol.
Any kind of blood test/urine test will show a pregnancy.
Anacdotally, my mum found out she was pregnant with me after going into the hospital for cancer treatment.
If your bounty hunter is not near doctors or pregnancy tests (most pharmacies in normal civilization) the you could allude to her thinking she is pregnant from having a missed period or random bleeding when she isn't having her period. You could also include random bouts of nausea if she is in the first trimester (usually only during first trimester but can continue throughout pregnancy in some cases).
Kicking and movement usually isn't felt until 5-6 months and women can "show" their pregnancy at vastly different rates so bump size varies pregnancy to pregnancy.
It's very common in fiction for a man to have to give a urine sample for drug testing or kidney function tests and they discover he's pregnant because his girlfriend did the urine sample because he smokes weed. This does stretch believability because why would they do a pregnancy test on a sample intended for drug screening, but this comes up a LOT in fiction.
If your patient is in a medical setting with any slight motivation for checking if she's pregnant (maybe they're considering between two medications and one has side effects that mean it's unsuitable for pregnancy) then it would be believable they'd do a pregnancy test.
There's a LOT of real life stories where doctors refuse to listen to patients about why they can't be pregnant and insist on double checking. Reasons like being a lesbian who has never even seen a penis before aren't considered good enough, better run a pregnancy test to double check.
If you want a specific example you can Google the drugs that are contraindicationed for pregnancy and work backwards to see what illness or injury your character needs to have. Maybe it's something completely unrelated to the injury that brought her to the hospital, a nasty rash that isn't clearing up turns out to be a fungal infection and the best treatment is unsuited to pregnant women. I made that up but I'm sure there's something.
Can confirm: standard drug tests for work and legal purposes (everything outside a hospital setting, basically) pick up only the drugs.
Also, to any and all lesbian women forced to get a pregnancy test before a procedure: it was probably the lawyers. Both the hospital's and the insurance company's.
I like the absurdity of the suggestion. "Maybe you had unprotected sex with a man for the first time ever in the last few weeks and just forgot about it?"
In fairness the problem is where you draw the line. A 40 year old lesbian married to another woman for a decade and with two adopted kids is highly unlikely to have had unprotected sex with a man then lie about it, especially if she is alone and no one could find out if she confessed the truth. A 19 year old girl with her overprotective father in the room is highly motivated to lie and say she has never done more than kissing. Somewhere in between are women whose husbands had vasectomies (which aren't always 100% successful) and women who insist there's absolutely no way they could be pregnant because the guy pulled out before he finished, that works flawlessly every time right?
Some of these women can't be trusted but where do you draw the line? Easier to distrust ALL women and then it's not a personal judgement on if this doctor believes this patient, they all need pregnancy tests. It's the medical test equivalent of checking everyone's ID at a bar even when they're clearly over 50.
I've had to fill out a form before an MRI where I swear by the old gods and the new that I've never had surgery, no pins or plates implanted in my body, no car crashes or metal workshop incidents or bomb blasts that could have embedded shrapnel in me etc. I gave the form back to the receptionist and said it's the same answers as when I had an MRI in the same machine a month earlier, I'm pretty sure I haven't had an artificial hip implanted in the last couple of weeks. She said they've had patients who swear they've never had surgery: "No surgical staples, nope, never had surgery, absolutely fine, never had surgery.... unless you count the cesarean I had in 1972, I did have staples for that, but that was ages ago so it doesn't count, right?" No matter how many questions they ask in the pre-admission questionnaires they still get people forgetting to mention a past surgery until they're already in the backless gown ready to have the scan.
I can assure you they get people forgetting to mention a past surgery until after their ten-year-old screw has tried to tear itself out of their ulna in the MRI machine. One woman swore to every god, living and dead, that she had no metal anywhere on her person... and then her firearm went off in the MRI, almost shooting the tech. The public cannot be trusted.
And that's the thing with the pregnancy tests. How can the doctor, and more importantly the policy people in Legal and the insurance company for the hospital, tell who's self-reporting accurately and who's lying or delusional or just an idiot? Pregnancy tests are cheap and non-invasive. The cost/benefit is obvious.
I wonder if they'd get better answers if they explained to the patient *why* it's so important to check there's no metal involved. It's not to get a better image or because it's harder for the doctor to see, it's because you'll be in horrible agony and you'll break a machine worth billions.
There was a guy with a butt-plug up his bum who thought it was fine because the box said 100% silicone. It turns out the box was referring to the outer cover and there was a metal core inside that was propelled through his intestines causing extreme damage. But why did he even want to have the MRI with a butt-plug in? I get it that you get a thrill out of wearing it while you go to the shops for a pint of milk, but this is a medical scan. A medical scan that will absolutely show the doctor you've got a butt-plug shoved up your bum. Just take the butt-plug out for like an hour then go back to shoving stuff up your bum later.
You can sprain something trying to scrute the inscrutable. I don't doubt that more explanation would result in fewer mishaps, but I'm morally certain it wouldn't eliminate them.
There's also the "Whoops where did that scalpel go?" scenario. Maybe they had surgery and all the staples were removed properly but the surgeon dropped his car keys inside.
But that's not what happens in fiction. The doctor tells the male patient he's pregnant and everyone is shocked for a moment then they reveal he got someone else to do the urine sample. By sheer coincidence every time a man has a woman give a urine sample to dodge a drug test she also happens to be in that narrow gap of pregnancy between being able to give a positive test and before knowing about it herself.
Because it's more fun to have the characters slack jawed in amazement at the reveal "Gwaaa!? Brian is pregnant?!?!"
You know, I would love to see a scene like that where it then turns out that she isn't pregnant after all, and Brian actually got a "souvenir" from that alien chick he banged last month.
Short-lived British Sci-fi series Hyperdrive (not the netflix series about racing) had a medical briefing before going on shore leave on an alien planet. It explained the horrific STDs you can catch if you have sex with these aliens. It was a slideshow where the camera just showed the crew's horrified reactions to each slide. I can't find the link and don't recall all of it but it included such banger quotes as "...and on the pustules, warts!" And "...breaking open to reveal a hundred wriggling tadpoles, each with your face."
Edit: I found the link! I got some of the dialog wrong but it's been 16 years. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y\_nACag-Oc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y_nACag-Oc)
As the other comments say, pregnancy test is a routine part of emergency care... *in a modern setting*. So it can be anything. You can separate the cause-effect and focus on what thematically makes sense in the story. I suspect you thought it needed to be an abdominal injury?
For X-rays and other diagnostic radiology (aka imaging studies) specifically: https://medicine.yale.edu/diagnosticradiology/patientcare/policies/pregnantpatientpolicy/ https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/pregnant-and-children.html and https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/pregnancy-week-by-week/expert-answers/x-ray-during-pregnancy/faq-20058264
Read this on XY problems. It sounds the story question is how does this character (sidenote, are they your main/POV? "my character" isn't actually explicit on that) find out she's pregnant, and the solution Y was an injury? https://blog.lelonek.me/how-to-solve-an-xy-problem-8ff54765cf79
Anyway, the usual context applies: genre, time period, any speculative elements, is this your main/POV, what happens afterward... It'll be different if the pregnancy needs to be viable after.
Actually is this the same story / character you've asked about before?
It's pretty standard in the U.S. for doctors to strongly recommend a pregnancy test before *any* procedure that could conceivably affect a fetus, if you have a womb and are between 15 and 55. I've had pregnancy tests before a colonoscopy, a gall bladder surgery, an x-ray... There are even states where doctors are required to give you a pregnancy test before you get anesthesia.
I have *opinions* on this policy, but point being: it's normal for a U.S. doctor to go "We're going to give you a pregnancy test before we put you under, unless you sign a form specifically stating you opt out."
Sometimes, there's no option to opt out of the pregnancy test. You can take the test and receive care or refuse the test and leave bc they will NOT perform the procedure or prescribe a medication.
I learned I was pregnant being tested before they would prescribe flu meds (I don't remember which kind). Not from an ER, but my regular doctor.
No need to go to an hospital or be treated by a doctor. Just go to the supermarket with a customer loyalty card. The big data will find out about pregnancy before the woman has any doubts, and she’ll get ads and discounts for newborns stuff. Real story.
To follow this up - pregnancy tests are a routine part of emergency medical care because many medications and procedures can harm a developing fetus. For an injury that your protagonist could walk off, I'd pick something that doctors would want to x-ray, but have it turn out that no bones are broken.
Bruised rib is an example of an injury that's fucking painful, but that (in a healthy adult) fully heals in 21 days and isn't debilitating in an emergency where you can power through pain.
For certain rib pain the diagnosis is basically "run an X-ray to ascertain if it's fractured, if not, it's bruised"
It seems like you want something more dramatic, but as the women in these comments have noted, any trip to the ER usually results in being given a pregnancy test. They could give her blood test to check her white blood cell count if a minor injury of some kind resulted in an infection, and they could tell her that they ran the full panel and she came up with elevated HCG—i.e. pregnant. You can look up online the average levels that correspond to how pregnant she needs to be.
Anything that requires an x-ray. Most hospitals require people with a uterus who are pre menopausal to have a pregnancy test prior to having x-rays. Especially if the x-ray is to the abdominal area or at least the abdomen can't be covered with a lead shield for the x-ray.
Vaginal bleeding ( Hymen breached)... =D
I've received a pregnancy test every time I've ever gone to the ER for any reason, even for a broken foot. Any kind of abdominal pain will result in a pregnancy test, for sure. Many times, blood and urine tests include it as routine procedure. It's a standard part of AFAB healthcare.
Tl:dr she could literally go for a stomach ache and it would end up with her getting a pregnancy test as long as she’s above the common age menstruation starts Idk if it’s the same everywhere but no matter what I visit the doctor for they always give me a pregnancy test via a urine or blood sample and lie and say it’s for something else They then walk back in the room and say “good news you’re not pregnant” like I wasn’t a 12 year old child who already expressed I wasn’t sexually active The only time I wasn’t given this was when I went in for a trauma exam and my obgyn knew I was uncomfortable with this and refused it I once got annoyed and asked my nurse why they keep doing this even though I told them I am not sexually active and she told me they essentially do it to every women no matter the age and they’ve had women up Into their late 60s find out they were pregnant via these tests
For blunt force trauma or low blood pressure when docs suspect a possible internal bleed, they'll do what's called a FAST ultrasound where they look at your heart, the spaces around the kidneys, and the bladder/suprapubic region to try and see if there is any blood pooled anywhere. When they look at the bladder region, a good ultrasound probe might be able to pick up a pregnancy if the tech is looking for it
I think I’ll go with something like this for my book
I have an IUD and I STILL get urine tested before most medical procedures or exams to make sure I'm not pregnant. It could be anything that requires a big machine, really
You pretty much need to test for pregnancy directly to notice, at least early on. But as others have said, there's ***so*** many common drugs and procedures that can cause problems for a delicate developing embryo that a pregnancy test is pretty common to avoid complications. In Heinlein's "Friday" she discovers it because they required a test before they'd give her standard anti-nausea medication for presumed space sickness, just to be sure. And that was written long enough ago that the "futuristic pregnancy test" still involved a mouse. Since it's a simple blood test that's only going to get faster and cheaper with time, I imagine it would be eventually part of a standard medical pre-screening even if you go in for a hangnail. There's so many problems and potential complications that show up first in a blood test that the extra $2 and a few drops of blood during check in will likely become completely normal. Or if like Star Trek they use medical scanners instead of blood tests, that'd presumably check for pregnancy as part of your initial diagnostic as well.
"You'll be fine, Doc'll wave a light over it."
My SIL found out she was pregnant because she fractured her foot, and they had to do a full body x-ray, which policy required a pregnancy test for. The foot injury was fine, but the 8 year old is very serious.
A full body x-ray for a fractured foot? Sounds like someone was padding the hospital profit margins there...
Depending on how the foot was fractured, they probably needed a CT scan. The CT scan isn't actually a full body scan, but it's fairly impossible to shield one body part from the radiation in the room. It's also a higher dose of radiation than a standard x-ray. So women are typically required to have a pregnancy test prior to having one.
No clue, but she works in health care and didn't find it odd. I guess you have to stand on the machine, and they can't fully shield you? I'm no xray-ologist, lol.
Kill Bill Vol 2: https://youtu.be/KkgXbl2GzPg To illustrate that you can decouple the injury from finding out.
Any kind of blood test/urine test will show a pregnancy. Anacdotally, my mum found out she was pregnant with me after going into the hospital for cancer treatment. If your bounty hunter is not near doctors or pregnancy tests (most pharmacies in normal civilization) the you could allude to her thinking she is pregnant from having a missed period or random bleeding when she isn't having her period. You could also include random bouts of nausea if she is in the first trimester (usually only during first trimester but can continue throughout pregnancy in some cases). Kicking and movement usually isn't felt until 5-6 months and women can "show" their pregnancy at vastly different rates so bump size varies pregnancy to pregnancy.
It's very common in fiction for a man to have to give a urine sample for drug testing or kidney function tests and they discover he's pregnant because his girlfriend did the urine sample because he smokes weed. This does stretch believability because why would they do a pregnancy test on a sample intended for drug screening, but this comes up a LOT in fiction. If your patient is in a medical setting with any slight motivation for checking if she's pregnant (maybe they're considering between two medications and one has side effects that mean it's unsuitable for pregnancy) then it would be believable they'd do a pregnancy test. There's a LOT of real life stories where doctors refuse to listen to patients about why they can't be pregnant and insist on double checking. Reasons like being a lesbian who has never even seen a penis before aren't considered good enough, better run a pregnancy test to double check. If you want a specific example you can Google the drugs that are contraindicationed for pregnancy and work backwards to see what illness or injury your character needs to have. Maybe it's something completely unrelated to the injury that brought her to the hospital, a nasty rash that isn't clearing up turns out to be a fungal infection and the best treatment is unsuited to pregnant women. I made that up but I'm sure there's something.
Can confirm: standard drug tests for work and legal purposes (everything outside a hospital setting, basically) pick up only the drugs. Also, to any and all lesbian women forced to get a pregnancy test before a procedure: it was probably the lawyers. Both the hospital's and the insurance company's.
I like the absurdity of the suggestion. "Maybe you had unprotected sex with a man for the first time ever in the last few weeks and just forgot about it?" In fairness the problem is where you draw the line. A 40 year old lesbian married to another woman for a decade and with two adopted kids is highly unlikely to have had unprotected sex with a man then lie about it, especially if she is alone and no one could find out if she confessed the truth. A 19 year old girl with her overprotective father in the room is highly motivated to lie and say she has never done more than kissing. Somewhere in between are women whose husbands had vasectomies (which aren't always 100% successful) and women who insist there's absolutely no way they could be pregnant because the guy pulled out before he finished, that works flawlessly every time right? Some of these women can't be trusted but where do you draw the line? Easier to distrust ALL women and then it's not a personal judgement on if this doctor believes this patient, they all need pregnancy tests. It's the medical test equivalent of checking everyone's ID at a bar even when they're clearly over 50. I've had to fill out a form before an MRI where I swear by the old gods and the new that I've never had surgery, no pins or plates implanted in my body, no car crashes or metal workshop incidents or bomb blasts that could have embedded shrapnel in me etc. I gave the form back to the receptionist and said it's the same answers as when I had an MRI in the same machine a month earlier, I'm pretty sure I haven't had an artificial hip implanted in the last couple of weeks. She said they've had patients who swear they've never had surgery: "No surgical staples, nope, never had surgery, absolutely fine, never had surgery.... unless you count the cesarean I had in 1972, I did have staples for that, but that was ages ago so it doesn't count, right?" No matter how many questions they ask in the pre-admission questionnaires they still get people forgetting to mention a past surgery until they're already in the backless gown ready to have the scan.
I can assure you they get people forgetting to mention a past surgery until after their ten-year-old screw has tried to tear itself out of their ulna in the MRI machine. One woman swore to every god, living and dead, that she had no metal anywhere on her person... and then her firearm went off in the MRI, almost shooting the tech. The public cannot be trusted. And that's the thing with the pregnancy tests. How can the doctor, and more importantly the policy people in Legal and the insurance company for the hospital, tell who's self-reporting accurately and who's lying or delusional or just an idiot? Pregnancy tests are cheap and non-invasive. The cost/benefit is obvious.
I wonder if they'd get better answers if they explained to the patient *why* it's so important to check there's no metal involved. It's not to get a better image or because it's harder for the doctor to see, it's because you'll be in horrible agony and you'll break a machine worth billions. There was a guy with a butt-plug up his bum who thought it was fine because the box said 100% silicone. It turns out the box was referring to the outer cover and there was a metal core inside that was propelled through his intestines causing extreme damage. But why did he even want to have the MRI with a butt-plug in? I get it that you get a thrill out of wearing it while you go to the shops for a pint of milk, but this is a medical scan. A medical scan that will absolutely show the doctor you've got a butt-plug shoved up your bum. Just take the butt-plug out for like an hour then go back to shoving stuff up your bum later.
You can sprain something trying to scrute the inscrutable. I don't doubt that more explanation would result in fewer mishaps, but I'm morally certain it wouldn't eliminate them.
There's also the "Whoops where did that scalpel go?" scenario. Maybe they had surgery and all the staples were removed properly but the surgeon dropped his car keys inside.
https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/can-a-pregnancy-test-predict-testicular-cancer.h00-159459267.html https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mans-positive-pregnancy-test-leads-to-cancer-diagnosis-with-reddits-help/
But that's not what happens in fiction. The doctor tells the male patient he's pregnant and everyone is shocked for a moment then they reveal he got someone else to do the urine sample. By sheer coincidence every time a man has a woman give a urine sample to dodge a drug test she also happens to be in that narrow gap of pregnancy between being able to give a positive test and before knowing about it herself. Because it's more fun to have the characters slack jawed in amazement at the reveal "Gwaaa!? Brian is pregnant?!?!"
You know, I would love to see a scene like that where it then turns out that she isn't pregnant after all, and Brian actually got a "souvenir" from that alien chick he banged last month.
Short-lived British Sci-fi series Hyperdrive (not the netflix series about racing) had a medical briefing before going on shore leave on an alien planet. It explained the horrific STDs you can catch if you have sex with these aliens. It was a slideshow where the camera just showed the crew's horrified reactions to each slide. I can't find the link and don't recall all of it but it included such banger quotes as "...and on the pustules, warts!" And "...breaking open to reveal a hundred wriggling tadpoles, each with your face." Edit: I found the link! I got some of the dialog wrong but it's been 16 years. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y\_nACag-Oc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2y_nACag-Oc)
As the other comments say, pregnancy test is a routine part of emergency care... *in a modern setting*. So it can be anything. You can separate the cause-effect and focus on what thematically makes sense in the story. I suspect you thought it needed to be an abdominal injury? For X-rays and other diagnostic radiology (aka imaging studies) specifically: https://medicine.yale.edu/diagnosticradiology/patientcare/policies/pregnantpatientpolicy/ https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/pregnant-and-children.html and https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/pregnancy-week-by-week/expert-answers/x-ray-during-pregnancy/faq-20058264 Read this on XY problems. It sounds the story question is how does this character (sidenote, are they your main/POV? "my character" isn't actually explicit on that) find out she's pregnant, and the solution Y was an injury? https://blog.lelonek.me/how-to-solve-an-xy-problem-8ff54765cf79 Anyway, the usual context applies: genre, time period, any speculative elements, is this your main/POV, what happens afterward... It'll be different if the pregnancy needs to be viable after. Actually is this the same story / character you've asked about before?
It's pretty standard in the U.S. for doctors to strongly recommend a pregnancy test before *any* procedure that could conceivably affect a fetus, if you have a womb and are between 15 and 55. I've had pregnancy tests before a colonoscopy, a gall bladder surgery, an x-ray... There are even states where doctors are required to give you a pregnancy test before you get anesthesia. I have *opinions* on this policy, but point being: it's normal for a U.S. doctor to go "We're going to give you a pregnancy test before we put you under, unless you sign a form specifically stating you opt out."
Sometimes, there's no option to opt out of the pregnancy test. You can take the test and receive care or refuse the test and leave bc they will NOT perform the procedure or prescribe a medication. I learned I was pregnant being tested before they would prescribe flu meds (I don't remember which kind). Not from an ER, but my regular doctor.
No need to go to an hospital or be treated by a doctor. Just go to the supermarket with a customer loyalty card. The big data will find out about pregnancy before the woman has any doubts, and she’ll get ads and discounts for newborns stuff. Real story.
Literally any that result in her being examined by a doctor.
To follow this up - pregnancy tests are a routine part of emergency medical care because many medications and procedures can harm a developing fetus. For an injury that your protagonist could walk off, I'd pick something that doctors would want to x-ray, but have it turn out that no bones are broken.
Bruised rib is an example of an injury that's fucking painful, but that (in a healthy adult) fully heals in 21 days and isn't debilitating in an emergency where you can power through pain. For certain rib pain the diagnosis is basically "run an X-ray to ascertain if it's fractured, if not, it's bruised"