My Fertility Journey - Part 1
My journey towards motherhood started on January first 2020, I pledged to stop drinking alcohol for at least three months before we started trying for our first baby. As I sipped my final few cocktails on New Years Eve, I daydreamed about starting a family, never did I think it would be such a difficult and frustrating journey. Despite the many setbacks and frustrations we encountered, our year and a half journey to fertility taught us so many things about ourselves, including that we are stronger than we once thought we were.
As someone who is heavily involved and dedicated to my personal health and wellbeing, I thought that getting pregnant would be a breeze! I thought I was in the peak of health, but one thing still haunted me, I was plagued by periods from hell every month; I had visited multiple OBGYN doctors throughout the years and told repeatedly that extreme pain, vomiting, and chills were normal, so I didn’t give it too much thought, I was just unlucky.
We thought, we’ll try in April and give birth in January, then have three months together before my husband returned to his seasonal buisness… another lesson I learned is that our plans aren’t necessarily Gods plans! After a year of unsuccessful attempts, and defeating painful periods, we finally decided to seek out help from a functional medicine fertility specialist and a traditional western fertility specialist. Both doctors ran a litany of different tests, the western doctor finding nothing wrong with myself or my husband and the functional doctor finding that my estrogen was extremely high, my progesterone was low, and my cortisol was bottomed out, indicating adrenal fatigue.
I was diagnosed with idiopathic (unknown cause) infertility and told by the western fertility specialist that there was over a 99% chance that I would never get pregnant on my own. He went on to tell me my best chance of pregnancy was to start clomid (which he already ordered to my pharmacy) and go in for an exploratory surgery to look for endometriosis. I had already researched these two options and knew that they were not options I was interested in due to the risks associated with them. If you are considering these options, I would encourage you to research ovarian cancer risks and the risk/benefit of exploratory surgery for endometriosis, there is a risk that it could make it worse. You can only make an informed choice if you have been fully informed!
When I went back to my functional medicine doctor with the test results and news, she looked at me and shook her head then told me, I know why you aren’t getting pregnant, your hormones are imbalanced, we will fix it, and I’m confident you be pregnant naturally within the year… spoiler alert, she was right.
My favorite resources for understanding your hormones and fertility:
Dr. Jolene Brighten “Beyond the Pill” “Is this Normal”
Rebecca Fett “It Starts with the Egg”