Gasping for air between cramps and cries, I laid on my bathroom floor overwhelmed with pain, loss, and failure. I was alone and confused. My hand gently wrapped around the most precious, lifeless secret. I only saw it for a brief second. After a painful force, I instinctively reached for it. When I saw it, I recognized it immediately. It meant this was over. The image seared onto my brain left me breathlessly crying and terrified to open my hand and look again or worse, show it to George.
My first miscarriage came two years into our marriage and a little more than two months after we made the conscious decision to try to start a family. We did nothing special to prepare outside of stopping to try not to get pregnant and taking vitamins. We were thrilled when we got a positive pregnancy test right away. George wanted to share the news with everyone, but I wanted to wait. He had told some of his family anyway and now that I had miscarried, I was lost on what to do. I was too emotionally fragile to talk about it. I spent the following week at work bleeding out the rest of my pregnancy, keeping to myself and desperately trying to act normal.
We wanted to know why it happened, but the doctor said it was common and assured us I’d be pregnant again in no time, sloughing off the idea that there was any need to investigate. As a year drifted by with no new pregnancy, it was time to take the next step. We went to a fertility clinic with hopes of getting an explanation as to what was going wrong with our fertility. They did a full workup with blood tests, ultrasounds, scans, and analyses. The overall diagnosis was “unexplained infertility” which was ironic since that was what we told them when they asked what brought us in. They found an unusual cyst on my ovary that they said we should monitor as well as a low AMH level, which meant that I had fewer eggs in reserve than was average for my age, but no definitive cause. We sat with the doctor reviewing these results and trying to figure out what this meant. We told him we really wanted to conceive naturally and asked him if he thought that was possible for us. He told us we had about a 5% chance. As that news was sinking in, he asked us point-blank why we had waited so long to start trying. Now 33 and 34, we were unaware our wait had been long, but now it seemed we owed him an apology. He recommended IVF (in-vitro fertilization), but when we hesitated, he offered some milder treatments like pills to boost ovulation and IUI (intrauterine insemination) and we got started on those. A year’s worth of drugs, appointments, waiting rooms and procedures, gave us one glimmer of hope with a positive pregnancy test that turned out to be a chemical pregnancy, only lasting one week. The mild stuff wasn’t working and IVF loomed over us like a thundercloud.
The three letters, IVF, left us divided. I was tired of monthly appointments, pills, scans, needles, injections and blood tests. It had been 2 years of trying with nothing to show. It felt like we had just been dipping our toes in the water and I was ready to dive in. IVF seemed to be the only thing left that the doctors could offer and we hadn’t yet tried. Getting pregnant in a lab was definitely not part of my dream, but I was willing to be flexible in pursuit of a family. George, however, was not willing to negotiate this one. He just couldn’t get on board with IVF because of the chance that we might create multiple lives (embryos) only to have a doctor choose which of those lives would have a chance at being born, which would be frozen for later or even worse discarded in the future. Since there was no physical reason telling us that was the only way, he was adamant that we find another way. We held off.
I hit the library reading books like, “Taking charge of your fertility” by Toni Weschler, “Fertility, Cycles and Nutrition” by Marilyn Shannon, “The Better Baby Book” by Dave Asprey and “The Infertility Cure” by Randine Lewis and so many more. There was a lot of contradictory information out there. Some books advised eating a lot of full-fat dairy products as a way to boost fertility and others said, no matter what, do not eat any dairy products! I did my best to try to decipher the advice that made the most sense to me. I learned about supplements like vitex, maca, inositol, ubiquinol, fish oil, etc. and how they impact egg quality and hormone balance. I did acupuncture and meditation trying to “relax” as was often advised. I tracked my cycles using Basal Body temperature and I used ovulation sticks to help with timing, but still no pregnancy.
During this time, my mom was not in great health. Her balance was effected and worsening from previous cancer treatments like chemo-therapy, brain surgery, and radiation. These treatments had made her cancer-free, but were responsible for her continued suffering. She lived alone and I would travel up to Omaha to spend time with her and help make decisions on how we could set her up to live her best life. We eventually had to sell her home and get her moved into an apartment where she could have some assistance. While I wouldn’t trade one minute of time I spent with her for anything, it was hard and it was sad. Watching her be forced to exchange her freedom and independence for her safety was cruel and painful. I was doing everything I could think of to take the lemons she’d been given and try to make lemonade, but it was a losing battle. As I reflect back on that time, I can’t help but just sob. I would never have admitted that I was stressed out because I was driven by love and a desire to make things right, but those were some of the most difficult days of my life.
I needed a total reset. I hit the library again to find books on cleansing and detoxing, I had heard these buzzwords, but I didn’t know how to take action. I came across books like “Whole” by T. Colin Campbell, “The Blue Zone Solution“ by Dan Buettner, “Clean” by Alejandro Junger, “The Beauty Detox Solution” by Kimberly Snyder. I learned I was not eating nearly enough vegetables and the processed foods and sugars I was eating would contribute to inflammation and disease. Some of these books highlight a vegetarian diet, so I gave that a go.
In no time at all, I had changed everything about my diet and skincare routines. I made lettuce wrap tacos by spicing up walnuts with cumin and cayenne to taste like taco meat. I put coconut oil and Shea butter on my face and body and ditched all store-bought skin creams and lotions, I even made my own toothpaste and deodorant. We started a garden and planted blueberry bushes. I sprouted alfalfa seeds to make fresh sprouts. I chopped cabbage to ferment and make sauerkraut and if I had dessert it was typically chia seed pudding. Before I knew it, ten pounds had melted off of me and I felt great. Weight loss was never my intention, but I didn’t mind that my body looked toned despite my not exercising more and my skin and eyes had never been so clear. Still no pregnancy.
As time went on, I started to feel like a shell of my old self. I was seeing a holistic ObGyn at the time and at my annual appointment, she reviewed my blood tests with me. We were both shocked to see my cholesterol levels were well below normal. In a family with risk of heart disease, low cholesterol initially sounded appealing, but she reviewed the very dangerous effects and urged me to change my ways. Despite working harder than ever to be healthy, I was not.
I needed more books and found “The Paleo Diet” by Loren Cordain, “The UltraMind Solution” by Mark Hyman MD, “Follow Your Gut” by Rob Knight. These tout a similar message as books named above regarding clean eating of vegetables and eliminating processed foods, but I began tuning in to the importance of eating meat from healthy wild-caught or pasture-raised animals. I had always really been a steak and potatoes girl and now I felt good about eating them. My cholesterol levels and weight normalized pretty quickly and I felt whole again, but still no pregnancy.
Suddenly, we were hit with unimaginably traumatic news. George’s mom died. She was only 59 and we were not at all equipped to handle news of this magnitude. We were devastated. Then, it was not even 10 months later that I was sitting next to my own mom who was unconscious in a hospice bed for 3 grueling weeks until she too died. She was 61. Life was blurry.
I needed more than books. I began a hormone balancing program with a functional medicine doctor to focus on getting my body healthy and restoring my fertility. I worked the program for about 8 months with little change, before adding a naturopathic doctor to supplement what I’d been doing. Still little change, so then I consulted a doctor of osteopathic medicine and a doctor of chiropractic medicine then another and on and on. I did genetic testing, blood testing, urine testing, body scans, hair mineral analysis – I even had my fecal matter tested! I pricked my finger daily to monitor my blood sugar, tracked my sleep, and meditated. I had my amalgam dental fillings removed and sat in a sauna for months to detox mercury. I learned how to self-administer coffee enemas. I did Arvigo therapy, Mayan abdominal massage, aromatherapy and even tried to harness energy from crystals. I became obsessed with eating right, cleansing, and detoxing plus supplementing to fill in the gaps in my diet and optimize my epigenetics. I was convinced that my lack of fertility was a sign of ill-health and I was going to do everything I possibly could to restore my health and fertility, but after all this, still no pregnancy.
I remember feeling great and heading in to see my latest functional medicine doctor to review my quarterly blood tests. She looked at me sadly and said that her latest analysis indicated that my body was in a catabolic state. I didn’t know what that meant and she didn’t seem able to explain. Her sad face made me think it was bad, but I looked to her to tell me what to do next. She recommended I stop exercising. This seemed like a joke. I sat at a desk for nearly 8 hours a day. I taught one Pilates mat class per week and I tried (but didn’t always) to get to an exercise class a few times per week, to think that was too much seemed laughable. It made no logical sense. It was disheartening that all that data gathering left me with more questions than answers and still no pregnancy.
Maybe IVF was the best answer, maybe I should quit messing around with all of this natural stuff and take advantage of the technology that’s out there before it’s too late and all my eggs are gone! George reluctantly came on board when we agreed that no matter what, any embryos we created would have a chance to become our babies. We returned to the clinic defeated, but we tried to hide the frowns on our faces while we submitted to the process. The doctor asked me if I wanted to have that cyst we were monitoring removed when scans revealed it remained unchanged. She told me that it might hinder the ability of the ovary to grow eggs, but it also might not. It was just up to me to choose. It felt like a coin flip decision, but I chose to have the surgery. This turned out to be pivotal.
We scheduled the laparoscopic surgery to remove the cyst. During surgery, the doctor discovered a severe case of endometriosis, which is a disease that can really only be diagnosed by surgery like this one. She was able to remove the cyst, which turned out to be endometriosis itself, but she told me that she wasn’t able to remove all of the disease. There were areas on my bladder and near my liver that she didn’t want to touch because it might do more harm than good. I asked how I could have such a disease with no symptoms. She told me that some women experience excruciating pain and some don’t, so I should consider myself lucky. She assured me that women still get pregnant with endometriosis and it would not impact my IVF cycle and we were off. Dollar bills flew out the door as I began injecting myself with drugs. In total, they harvested 8 eggs (very low by IVF standards), but 5 of them fertilized and made it to the stage at which they could be frozen for implantation later. George and I were giddy with excitement at the prospect of having 5 kids! On implantation day, we learned that only 2 had survived the thaw, so mourning the loss of 3, we implanted both and prayed for twins. After the slowest two weeks of our lives, the pregnancy test revealed, negative.
There was no explanation as to why it didn’t work. We shouldn’t have been too surprised because success rates were a little more than 40% at the time, meaning that the majority of the time it doesn’t work, but we were surprised and more than that, we were sad. It was a lot of emotional stress, time off work and worry and we were again left no closer to the goal. They said we could try again and they would make tweaks to the drug protocol to try to get more eggs and thus more embryos. Some of our friends offered information about other clinics with better rates of success. Ultimately, starting over didn’t seem possible for us, we were done. We had started with frowns and now we were somewhat bitter, angry and regretful. My body felt puffy and sluggish. I now needed detox more than ever. We rested.
I took time to grieve the loss of my mom reflecting on her short life. There was so much she had wanted to do, but her life was interrupted by a forced battle with cancer. As I reflected on how I was living my own life, I realized I was choosing to battle with infertility. There was nothing forcing me to do it and it was costing me a lot of living. I was driven by fear and I was telling myself that I wasn’t a good enough wife, woman, or person because I didn’t have a baby. Once I was able to identify that deep shameful feeling over something I couldn’t control, I surrendered. I had to consciously flip the script in my story. I began to tell myself I was lucky for all the things I did have and I put my energy into being grateful. Doing this opened my eyes to other areas where I had been struggling. There was a lot I was doing because I thought I was supposed to and I was ignoring my inner wisdom and drive to use the unique gifts I’d been given. Once I was willing to drop the need to live the life I thought the world wanted me to live, everything started to change.
With George’s support, I made a big decision. We trimmed the fat in our budget and made some sacrifices, so I could quit my corporate sales job. It had been a good, safe job and I felt lucky to have it for a long time, but I felt like I had to play a character to fit the role of the job and that character became too much of a stretch. I started to dread getting up in the morning to go in, it was no longer worth the pay. My heart pounded as I typed my resignation letter questioning whether this was the right thing to do, but as soon as I hit ‘send’ a giant weight lifted and the questioning was gone. I began teaching more Pilates wherever anyone would have me until it became a full-time job. I enrolled in an online nutrition education course with the Institute of Transformational Nutrition, so that I could learn how to better decipher the conflicting information I had read in all those books. I was now leaping out of bed each morning excited for what the day would bring.
While our desire to start a family was still there, we no longer let it drive our lives. If it happened, great! If it didn’t, we’d still have each other and many other blessings. We combined my love for travel and George’s love for the Kansas City Royals and began to get out and watch the Royals play baseball in cities I wanted to explore, like Boston, Seattle, New York, Chicago, Dallas. George would join me for trips to random cities as I continued my Pilates education. We took trips to Florida, California, Colorado and Nashville. We did a 5-day bike trip across Missouri on the Katy Trail. We visited George’s sister in Spain. We began mentoring children that live nearby in a group home and then started a concert fundraiser for them that we hosted in our yard. The possibilities now seemed endless, life had never been better.
Then, suddenly, more traumatic news. My dad died. It was a single car accident that happened while he was living fully with people he loved doing what he loved, which is a comforting thought, but his death came with no warning. He passed quickly with no time for anyone to say goodbye. The shock of it all left me stunned and stumbling through the grieving process. He was a healthy 65-year-old. It’s almost like the earth shifted when he left and I’ve been walking on uneven ground ever since.
A year later, one November morning, I took a pregnancy test and it was positive! We were shocked and thrilled! This must be it, finally our time for joy! We had an appointment with a doctor and saw the baby’s heartbeat and announced our pregnancy to George’s family at Christmas and we all celebrated! We planned to tell my family when we saw them the following week.
By the end of the week, I miscarried. While devastating we knew this time that we were going to get through it together. We shared our joy and then our grief and life carried on. In March, my brother-in-law randomly sent me the name Dr. Hilgers from the Pope Paul VI Institute in Omaha, Nebraska and said I should check out their approach to infertility. Despite being from Omaha, I had never heard of this place before, but a google search produced a video with Dr. Hilgers explaining what he called NaPro Technology (Natural Procreation Technology). The strategy was to get to the root cause of infertility and treat that cause so that a couple can conceive naturally. He said “unexplained infertility” is the diagnosis that you get when doctors don’t know how to look further and at his clinic, he teaches doctors how to get down to the root cause. This sounded like a dream! It was what we thought we were going to get when we originally went to the fertility clinic. I couldn’t believe that I had never come across this information before.
I found a local Kansas City physician who had trained under Dr. Hilgers in NaPro Technology (Gianna Family Care in Shawnee, Kansas). Instantly, I signed up for the membership-based service and made an appointment to meet with a doctor. They began by teaching me how to chart my cycles using The Creighton Method (fertilitycare.org). They explained that infertility can be attributed to malfunctions of the following in women: ovulation, hormones, tubes, mucus, and/or disease. In the man: sperm quality is all that matters. After a few months of charting, the doctor could see that I had a shortened luteal phase, indicating an imbalance in hormones. My medical history told her that I had endometriosis. She offered a prescription for a bio-identical hormone, called HCG, to lengthen my cycle by helping my body produce more progesterone and she recommended I consider surgery to rid my body of the remaining endometriosis since it is a known cause of infertility and miscarriage. I let her know that the previous doctor told me that the disease was in hard to reach areas and not be able to be removed. She assured me that NaPro Technology trained surgeons were very thorough and would have the tools to remove the disease.
I battled with the idea of having another surgery since I had no outward symptoms other than infertility and miscarriage, but I also knew of women with endometriosis that were able to conceive. I began the HCG injections and they did lengthen my cycle, but there was still no pregnancy. I realized there was no point in only taking half of the recommendations if I wanted to reap all of the benefits and I really didn’t want to go through another miscarriage. Plus the idea that there was disease lurking inside my body was unsettling and if this doctor had the tools to remove it then that was a good thing regardless of pregnancy outcome.
In October 2019, ten years after George and I married, we drove across the state to St Louis, Missouri to meet with the recommended surgeon, Dr. Michael Dixon at Saint Gerard Obstetrics and Gynecology. After reviewing our case, examining me, and talking over our medical history with us for about an hour, he said, “Well I hate to stick my neck out there too far, but this seems to be a pretty cut and dry case, you’ll be pregnant in no time.” George and I were shocked by his confidence. Did he know we were 39 and 40? Did he know we’d previously been given a 5% chance? Did he know we’ve been at this for 7 years? He did. We remained cautiously optimistic and set the surgery for November 25, 2019.
When I woke up, I was told the surgery went well. Dr. Dixon had given me a video and photographs of the surgery, so I could see all that had taken place inside my body. He said that despite my not having painful symptoms, I had a severe case of endometriosis. He explained that the previous surgeon had not been able to remove some of the areas because she just didn’t have the right tools and training, but estimated that he removed 99.9% of the disease. He reminded me that this is a disease that, while gone for the moment, is not really cured. It may come back, but we won’t know if or when. He said I should expect chaos with my cycle for the next month or two and I should take the next 4 weeks to heal. We planned our 10-year anniversary trip to Hawaii and New Zealand for 4-weeks later and flew off on December 26, 2019.
We arrived home on January 18, 2020 and the first thing I did was take a pregnancy test and lo and behold it was positive! In the coming weeks, I felt amazing, no morning sickness, great sleep and boosts of energy. This, of course, worried me because I read that women are supposed to be sick and tired in the first trimester and that having morning sickness is a sign of a solid pregnancy. So we kept the news to ourselves this time to spare our families the emotional roller coaster ride. We visited the doctor at Gianna Family Care and confirmed the pregnancy, they measured my progesterone, and we even got to see a fast blinking light of a heartbeat inside me via ultrasound. They prescribed bio-identical progesterone injections to help keep my levels up. At 10-1/2 weeks we went in to hear the heartbeat, which was not initially found with the Doppler, so we tried to keep our cool until we finally saw by ultrasound our little baby kicking and punching inside me with a strong blinking heartbeat! Then, at 14-1/2 weeks, the moment that Doppler touched my skin we heard the sound of a strong beating heart for the first time. My insides beamed with joy and relief as she smiled and said it sounded good! Now, 21-weeks in, I’m feeling kicks and a greater connection to the life growing inside me and as my belly grows I’m facing some anxiety over announcing this news while I still have painful scars from previous losses.
I’ve been in a bit of a cocoon at home on “Shelter in Place” orders due to the COVID-19 outbreak. We have been surrounded by uncertainty and, for me, a lot of free time, some of which I used to reflect back and type up this story. I’m cooking a lot, eating well, practicing Pilates and still teaching via face-time, Facebook live, YouTube and Zoom and I can’t remember a time in my life that I have ever felt better than I do right now. I have no idea what will happen from here, but I hope this pregnancy ends in us holding our healthy baby in a healthy world. I am trying to stay calm and grateful for each day as it comes. For years, I’ve had a little rock on my nightstand that says “patience” on it, I’m not even sure where it came from, but it’s fitting. I’ve always been annoyingly pleased with efficiency and absurdly disappointed when things take longer than (I believe) they should. My husband affectionately (or not) calls me “Impatient Traci” slowly emphasizing each syllable for a little extra grind on my nerves, so I’m trying to harness patience during this time. I’ve realized though that as much as I’ve tried to be in control, I’ve never been nor will ever be in control of the outcome. This pregnancy is no exception. I can control how I eat, move, think and breathe. I can get myself to the doctors and I can take vitamins, but the outcome is still not really up to me. So, I’m doing my best to listen to my body and follow my heart, which is what led me to share our story. I know there are a lot of couples who can relate, I’ve seen their nervous faces in the waiting rooms throughout the years. No one wants to be in the “infertility club” and if our story can help someone out of it then its worth celebrating!
