Hi and welcome to Episode One of The Hormonal Mama. I am your host Cara Drescher. If you listened to my trailer or my Episode Zero, then you should have a good idea of what this podcast is about; discussion about infertility, pregnancy, and the postpartum period. While I like to focus primarily on skincare and wellness, I wanted to take some time to really break down my experiences personally, with each of these periods in time. I’ll talk later about my professional experience, but since I feel so connected to each of these particular areas personally; I wanted to take some time to talk about that. So in today’s episode I’m going to be talking about my experience with infertility.
So my infertility journey began long before I knew that it began. So I got married when I was 32, and not long after getting married I realized that I was really ready to start a family. But I wasn’t as ready as I thought I was. So, financially I wasn’t ready and mentally, maybe I wasn’t ready. And there were a lot of other factors that went into it, but my biological clock was ticking very very very loudly in my ears, making me crazy every day. And every day it got harder because I was just feeling this insane urge to become a mother, and it got more and more difficult every day because the timing wasn’t right. And the timing wasn’t right for about three years. This went on and on and on, me being frustrated and ready to start my family with my husband but knowing that I couldn’t. My friends were getting pregnant and family was getting pregnant, and it, was getting difficult to just put on a happy face and be happy that someone else I knew was having a baby when that was all that I wanted.
Things got even more dramatic for me and more intense when my older sister and my best friend (who’s also my cousin), so lots of relatives here, both announced pregnancies within a few weeks of each other. Both were very out of the blue, at least for me, and it really hit me. I wanted a baby so badly that I felt like the world was just going crazy around me and everybody around me was having babies. So, I call this my pre infertility journey, because these are the years leading up to my infertility diagnosis and dealing with true infertility after dealing with years of feeling, almost like I was dealing with infertility issues. It was hard. It was very, very frustrating. Every day I just felt like I was getting older and further away from the possibility of becoming a mother. You know, they tell you all the time that after age 35, it gets harder and your chances drop dramatically because of egg resereve and other complicated issues relating to fertility and age. So at this point I think I was 34, and approaching 35 and feeling very just out of touch with everything. I was really really depressed, I should say bordering on depression. I wasn’t quite there, but I was close. And then, miraculously, another relative announced a pregnancy and my husband and I both decided, “Okay, this is our turning point. I think that we are finally ready to get the ball rolling.”
So my husband and I were finally ready to start our family. I was 35, my husband was 37, and we knew it might be a little bit harder because we were a little older. But, you know, we didn’t really have any reason to believe that it wouldn’t happen. So we started trying in November. A few months went by, getting lots of negative pregnancy tests and nothing was happening. So, it was very upsetting. But we also knew we needed to give it some time; at least six months. So, once – I want to say it was around July or August that we said, “Ok, it’s time to see a specialist.”
So I was going to be getting a referral to a Reproductive Endocrinologist, also known as a Fertility Specialist. And while all this was going on business was going very well for me, I was working as a Massage Therapist, because as you know, that is my training, I’m a Massage Therapist & and Esthetician. I was specializing in prenatal massage. So I was doing all this work in prenatal care and it was great. I was feeling so confident that I knew so much about pregnancy, that there was no way that I wasn’t going to conceive as well.
So I had a business meeting with a group of other wellness professionals who focused on pregnancy, and it was a great meeting. The only problem was that I was the only woman at the meeting who didn’t have children. And so every time the conversation came up, or someone said “Oh do you have any kids?” and I would say no it would get a little uncomfortable because it seemed like they all just wanted to talk about their kids. So, long story short, the meeting was great, but was getting very emotional for me. Every time that I mentioned to someone that you know, I had been trying for a while, and not getting pregnant they clearly got uncomfortable. And that makes it a lot harder when you’re trying to conceive and you’re already in your own head about “Why isn’t it happening?”. And then other people get uncomfortable, because there’s such a stigma around infertility that there shouldn’t be. It shouldn’t be this thing that people feel ashamed of. But I did, and the discomfort that it was bringing to other people was making it a lot harder for me.
So I, at one point excused myself to the restroom, because I couldn’t contain it and I just started crying. I was just hysterical. Cleaned myself up went back out to the business meeting and realized I needed to go home. I couldn’t compose myself enough to be professional, so I excused myself. I think I made something up and said something like, “I need to get home to my husband.” or, you know, something so that I could leave without showing my tears. But of course, the minute I walked out the door, the tears came. I got in the car, called my husband who was himself at a business meeting. So he couldn’t talk, and I was just hysterical. I just cried and cried and cried. And remember, at this point, I didn’t even know that we were really dealing with infertility. I just knew that I hadn’t gotten pregnant yet, and I didn’t know why. So I got home, and cried some more. Eventually, my husband got home from his meeting, and I cried all night. I cried myself to sleep that night. It was terrible.
When I woke up in the morning my eyes were so puffy. I couldn’t see clearly. And this was the morning, that everything changed for me and for us. My husband was getting ready to leave for work. It wass about, I want to say eight o’clock in the morning. My husband was at the front door, and we lived in an apartment at the time. It was a split level, so from the kitchen there was, I want to say about five or six steps that led down into the living room, where the door to the bathroom was. The front door was on the other side of the kitchen. So my husband’s at the front door and he said, “Alright, bye, honey!” And I said “Bye!” Remember, my eyes were super ultra swollen from sobbing and crying so hard the night before that I was probably even crying in my sleep.
I stepped down to go down the stairs, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor. I had somehow tripped on the top step and grabbed the railing, but I had lost my balance so badly that the weight of my body pulling myself forward dislocated my shoulder that was holding on to the railing. And because of the pain of that I let go of the railing and fell down the stairs and landed on the floor right by the bathroom door. Of course I screamed and my husband heard me fall down the stairs. I don’t really remember falling down the stairs at this point; this was also four years ago. But I still remember hearing my body thud against each step, which in itself is quite traumatic. So, my husband of course came running, “Oh my gosh! Are you okay? You just fell down the stairs!” and I was crying but I said, “You know, you have to go to work. I’ll be okay.” I was in pain, but I was really tired. I was exhausted. So, my husband went to work. I got back into bed and I slept for another two hours. And when I woke up, I knew something wasn’t right. I felt insane pain in my neck and my back, which turned out to be whiplash, and I would later find out that I had dislocated my shoulder, and that I had torn tendons in my rotator cuff in my shoulder. Long long long story short, I ended up needing surgery.
I was out of work for 13 months. I had surgery to repair my torn rotator cuff tendon, two months after my fall. That was October that I had my surgery. In April, I had to have what they call a shoulder manipulation. Which means, I had developed frozen shoulder/adhesive capsulitis. Which is when basically there’s an excessive buildup of scar tissue and you can’t move the joint. I’ve never experienced anything like it. The pain, the inability to use my muscles; it was just completely stuck. It was some of the worst pain I’ve ever experienced. So, I had to go under anesthesia they had to basically break up the scar tissue manually. My orthopedic surgeon later told me, everyone in the operating room cringed when she yanked my shoulder and went *crackling sound*. And, you know, hearing that, after you just had this surgery to fix it and everything, it was unpleasant to say the least. However, this happened during the whole process of trying to conceive, so we lost about seven or eight months of trying because I was dealing with this traumatic shoulder injury. I was in a sling for six weeks. I couldn’t use my arm, and there was no way that I could risk getting pregnant. And then, not being able to even hold my child because I was having all of these complications with my shoulder. So like I said, we lost about seven months of trying. And, you know, my emotional state was not good. I had already spent three years desperately wanting to have a baby and not being able to. Then I spent another what seven or eight months trying and not having success. And then I lost another seven or so months trying, because I couldn’t do anything about it. And it, -there’s no other way to word it- it sucked, we’ll just say that it sucked.
So once my shoulder was starting to heal a little bit, we knew that it was time to at least see the specialist and find out what may or may not be going on so that we would know what our next steps were.
In February, we went in to see the fertility specialist, otherwise known as Reproductive Endocrinologist. And we had some testing done, and it turned out that there were no obvious reasons for why we couldn’t conceive. So, we were put into the category of unexplained infertility. I can’t speak for other categories of infertility, but for unexplained infertility, I can simply say it is extremely frustrating to not have an answer. “We have no idea why you can’t conceive, you just can’t.” And that makes it a little tricky to know what the treatments going to be. Is something going to work? I mean, there’s no guarantee with anything, of course, but again, I can only speak from my experience with unexplained infertility; and it’s very, very frustrating. There are no answers it’s just, “Here, we’re gonna try all these different things.” So to make a very long, long, involved story short, we jumped right in.
We started with Clomid, and no other intervention. Then from there we decided to try IUI, which is intrauterine insemination. And that’s you know, basically when you hear artificial insemination it’s really the same thing. So, they usually say after about three IUI If you hadn’t had success, it’s most likely not going to work, but those are just statistics. And while statistics I think are very important, they’re not going to give you an answer to everything. So I felt like after three, I didn’t want to give up. I wanted to keep trying. So, with this amazing doctor that we had, we tried, I think it was seven IUIs total. And we went through an IVF cycle. Our IVF cycle was not successful. They only retrieved seven eggs. Out of seven eggs, only three of them were mature and only one of them fertilized. And so we only had one little embryo, well it wasn’t an embryo at that point, it’s called a blastocyst at that point. We transferred it into my uterus and it did not implant. So it was a failed IVF and it was devastating. It was devastating. Every day I woke up and I just stared at the window and didn’t want to talk. I was really in a bad place, and I had sort of drifted into a depression. I was just distraught.
So, during all of this during all of these fertility treatments, these IUIs and IVF, and the failures and negative pregnancy tests. My friends, we’re all getting pregnant. I have three best friends who well I have a number of best friends but these particular three, who were all in my wedding, I was in their weddings, they were all in each other’s weddings. They were all getting pregnant, and it was devastating for me because I wanted so much to be happy for them, and to love their sweet babies. But I was so sad for myself and depressed and heartbroken and feeling like, the only word I can think of is devastated, that I just was completely overwhelmed with complicated emotions. How do you try and sort through such sadness and envy, while also trying to process happiness and love for that person. It is so hard. I’ve never experienced such complicated emotions. After dealing with the emotions of that and the emotions of all these failures, it was time to see a new specialist. I loved my doctor and I wish that I could have stayed with her but we needed to try something else. At this point we had already been through I think 11 or 12 fertility treatments with no success.
So we went to see a new specialist that I was referred to through a different doctor. And she was very, very creative in her approach. Very outside the box, very non traditional, really wanting to try something new. Because we had had no success and there was no explanation for our infertility or for why the IUIs and the IVF didn’t work, she got very creative and very aggressive with her treatments. So instead of taking just one medication, I took two. I took Clomid and letrozole. The idea was to make me ovulate, even though I had already been ovulating. She wanted to try something new, so we tried it, and we tried an IUI… and it didn’t work. We were going to do IVF again, so we started the process. I got all the paperwork ready, we were going to be doing IVF again in January. And so we did one more cycle with just the medications, and we were going to do another IUI.
When we went into the office for my mid cycle ultrasound, I had already ovulated, which was surprising because it was much earlier than anticipated. So, we couldn’t do an IUI, it was too late. So, we just had to try the natural way, the way we had been trying for 3 years. And miraculously, I got pregnant! And I got pregnant… with triplets! It’s still a shock. It was a shock to my doctor, she couldn’t believe it, and yeah. There’s not much to say, other than what a shock. Shock of a lifetime, really. So, there I was, pregnant with triplets. For the first time in my life I was pregnant and there were 3 babies in there.
So, that brings me to the end of this episode, and my very convoluted infertility journey. Tune in to my next episode, where I will talk about my pregnancy journey. I look forward to telling you all about that, so you can learn a little bit more about me so that when you tune in to my podcast or read my blog, you know why I’m sharing all the things I’m sharing. So, thanks so much for listening, and I will talk to you next time!
