The start of infertility issues:
Diagnosed with mild Crohn’s Disease on my 30th birthday, this became the catalyst for what would become a wealth of physical and mental ailments over the next decade.
I had serious ongoing pain from minor endometriosis and a spider web of lesion scars over my reproductive organs. I had a Laparoscopy and scaring was removed after 8 years of pain. It was ‘gamble surgery’, they didn’t know what they were going to find - it was severe damage - both tubes were blocked, luckily one was completely freed up easily enough but the other was hard to clear.
6 months later after weeks of feeling like I had a head cold, nauseous and dizzy, I went to the doctor who claimed I had a water borne infection. The diagnosis - a rather bizarre one - considering I hadn’t travelled to a third world country for a while. Coincidentally I had to take a pregnancy test before I was allowed to take medication to treat it. I felt there was no need to do the test, so you can imagine my confusion when I saw a positive sign on the test!
I could not fathom how it was possible, I still had my period and it just didn’t make sense. I went back to the doctor and sat there dumbfounded as he said ‘congratulations’.
My first thought was rather instinctive - an ectopic pregnancy. Why? Something just didn’t feel right. They rushed me for tests that were inconclusive and after a week or so of visiting the early pregnancy clinic every second day, it was confirmed I was at least 10 weeks pregnant and I didn’t just have an awful cold.
The process that followed was surreal, I felt like I was in a movie and this wasn’t really happening to me. I had no choices, it was considered a life or death situation, so I just did as I was told. It was rush here, no actually - go there, ok come back here, for days on end. My HCG levels were up and down and that was the only conclusive evidence they could find. I was rushed into surgery and shortly after I lost my left Fallopian tube and was told I was in danger of loosing the other one. IVF would possibly be my only future.
This wasn’t a planned pregnancy and it was at quite possibly THE worst time in our relationship. Yet it still knocked me for six and I was astounded at how long it took to recover. I was kind of numb about the whole experience in the lead up to the operation and I had thought the recovery would be like the laparoscopy I had 6 months earlier. I figured it would take one to two weeks to bounce back, but I didn’t, I felt like I was not progressing at all.
Adrenal Fatigue:
In that time I knew I could never go back to the stress of my job, it was a fight to be there every day and I just didn’t have the energy anymore. At this point I started a career in TV. A new job that was less stressful in one sense but demanded a minimum 50 hours in the office each week, my body started to fail me further. I had to push harder and harder just to get out of bed and function. On the weekend’s I was stuck on the couch all day, every weekend. Even the thought of moving the TV remote back on the table, required a massive spout of energy that I just did not have. I would plan in my head all day to take my empty lunch plate to the kitchen, but even the thought process was enough to exhaust me. Getting up to do it was not even a possibility.
I thought this was all a side effect from being tired from such a demanding job…little did I know that I had adrenal fatigue and a very bad case of it. The thing about adrenal fatigue is you can function to a point, you can work and get home but as soon as you stop for a second, you are frozen with tiredness. It feels like walking around with concrete blocks on your legs each day.
It’s not just the exhaustion that gets you. It affects your hormones, my period was heavy, my body felt out of whack, eating and drinking alcohol made me feel nausea’s, my mind foggy and the bones in my arms and hands started to feel like someone was driving a needle through them.
Adrenal fatigue starts off slow and progresses through your body until you feel like a delicate brittle shell of who you once were. It was one of the hardest battles I have ever fought, trying to put one leg in front of the other became a mental game that seemed impossible to act out on, I felt trapped in my body.
I of course didn’t know what was wrong and even though I was seeing a naturopath I felt worse, not better! It was actually a Kinesiologist who ended up diagnosing my pain. She explained that with Adrenal fatigue your body uses up every organ – one by one - to try and supply the energy you need – until you burn right though to your last organs. The adrenal glands. Once these burn out – you have to re-build each organ and this takes time – a painfully long time.
The way I recovered was long and slow. I started out by changing my diet and getting my hormones in check – my Oestrogen was completely out of balance. I found a fertility specialist/ naturopath online and booked an appointment to see her to stabalise my hormones and get my health back. At this time I was wanting to fix my health but with the long term goal of falling pregnant, even though it wasn’t 100% on the cards with my partner yet.
Fertility Naturopathy:
Once the dust had settled from the ectopic pregnancy, we started to think ‘maybe it was time to start trying to conceive’, as we had put the last year behind us. Yet it took what felt like a lifetime to recover and over that time, the kinesiologist I was seeing, suggested treatment with her could help ‘balance me’.
Every week she said the same thing ‘your body is saying it needs time to recuperate’ and would give me readings and quotes and essential oils to take. I got incredibly impatient with my bodies request, I mean how much time did it need?? I was so one sighted about wanting to ‘move on’ that I never really took stock of what was really going on, listen to my body and giving it what it was begging for -rest. Instead I was impatient and didn’t see the red flags my body was throwing as a warning.
I had so many tests done with my naturopath that a regular doctor would dismiss as a waste of time. And thank god she did. It turned out I have a mutant gene - MTHFR (which at the time no–one tested for, now it seems to be coming up in blogs, forums etc. everywhere) which means I am more prone to miscarriage and need more Vitamin B than the regular person. These little nuggets of information added to my complicated story and I had a bespoke plan created for me to get me super healthy so I could conceive naturally.
It was time to step it up and my fertility naturopath started me on a strict diet and tons of supplements and the big one - cutting out alcohol and all social life. Fun? No! Essential? Yes!.And it took time to heal. I am talking a year and a half and every ounce of discipline to recover. In fact I don’t know if I ever felt ‘fully recovered’ at that point.
After approximately 6 months she gave me the green light to try to conceive. As always seemed to be the case, I had a thousand things going on and even though I knew I was still feeling shaky, I was desperate to start and ignored how bad I was. And then started the carousel of miscarriages and chemical pregnancies. My body just couldn’t hold a pregnancy as it was too stressed out. It was not a happy camper and here I was asking it to carry a baby. Of course I know this all in hindsight – but back then it was just hitting wall after wall. Pushing myself and coming up short every time. I wish I had realised earlier that my body was scared of a pregnancy due to the traumatic experience of the ectopic. The thing I wanted the most, was also what scared me the most.
How I unexpectedly ended up doing IVF:
After falling pregnant on the second month of trying, I miscarried after 6 weeks. I was requiring a gynaecologist and just so happened to get one who worked at an IVF clinic who took me as an outside patient...she heard my story, saw my age and told me I should fast track our efforts. It was a sales pitch and it sounded like I was going to achieve my goal to be a mother quickly. Sold!
One upside of meeting her is that she identified that I did have endometriosis (an unsure diagnosis with previous doctors) and this could be causing some of the infertility issues. Looking back, IVF was an expensive and painful journey that I wasn’t ready for but she was a specialist and I trusted her for that. My partner and I had hardly discussed IVF yet next thing, we were signing legal forms about the rights of an embryo if one of us dies!
Things moved fast, too fast and warning signs were flashing at a speed you see when looking out of a window on a fast train – blurry and hard to focus. The cost per round was expensive and as we hadn’t planned this far ahead, we were digging into our pockets for money without realising the final cost.
So here I am diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease, adhesions damage to my reproductive organs, Endometriosis, one fallopian tube, 41 years of age – recovering from Adrenal burnout and they suggest I go on a round of IVF – just to see how we go. The fact that I had fallen pregnant 6 weeks earlier naturally was dismissed as me having old eggs – hence the hurry.
On one hand I had a highly qualified and well respected fertility naturopath who believed I could fall pregnant naturally and on the other hand, a well-respected IVF specialist calling me to say ‘tick tock’ let’s get this moving!
My impatience is what made the decision at the end. I had already been chasing the dream for a year and I didn’t want to spend the next couple of years ‘trying’. Hence the rushed and possibly poorly planned decision to do IVF.
