If your fertility supplements are strong enough to heal, they’re strong enough to harm. And many of us on this awesome trail of baby making have learned, that more  isn’t always better.

 This blog post tells the story of the uncanny power of the Orphans to blind us at every step of our fertility journey.  When our choices–be they related to fertility supplements, fertility treatments, choice of practitioners,  or anything else in our lives—are guided by the fragile, fix-me-quick-and-please-don’t-make-me- think voices within us, our bodies rebel and scream for mommy until they’re heard.

 A few weeks ago, T. a Fertile Heart mom who’s jorneyeing to conceive her second child– after a bittersweet healing during one of our Fertility Support Phone Circles –asked for a private check-in session. The sessions with each person unfold in their own perfect way and although T.initially  wanted to do some additional work on some of the emotional roadblocks that became apparent with her latest revelations, we spent much of the call addressing unexpectedly whacky hormones.

 At the beginning of the consult T. spoke about her confusion:

“In March, 2011, blood work revealed that my FSH was 21.  I was advised by my fertility specialist that I would need to act fast in order to conceive a second child as menopause was imminent.  She felt that our best chance of conceiving would be to try fertility drug-assisted IUI for 6 months.  If we weren’t pregnant after six months we should consider using a donor egg or adopt.  At that time I thought that I had two choices:  follow the advice of the fertility specialist, or seek the advice of a Naturopath.  I felt that a Naturopath would be a kinder and gentler way to approach my issue, so I decided to make an appointment. 

 My first visit with Dr. J went smoothly, She asked me questions about my menstrual cycles and then said she wanted to do more testing called Electro-Dermal Screening to see exactly what was going on with my body.  She said it was new technology that is commonly used in Australia.   I sat down and held a metal rod with one hand while a technician pressed a smaller rod into different areas of my feet and hands.  The results revealed many red areas or organs that were “stressed”.  I was then tested to see which herbs or vitamins would fix the organ system in question, by simply placing a bottle on the silver tray.  I was amazed by how simple and efficient the whole process was.  I left with a handful of pills, powders and tinctures that were tailored to my body and went happily on my way grateful for technology.  I went back three more times to Dr. J and had repeat EDS testing done with every visit.  Each time the test revealed more and more green results or “balanced” body systems.  I was thrilled.  Progress at last.

 However, despite everything that the testing showed, my menstrual cycles seemed to be getting worse.  I was ovulating very late (day 20-22, and producing minimal cervical mucus) and my cycles were becoming very long (averaging 32-35 days). Even though I had all of these beautifully colored charts showing that my organ systems were “balanced” with all of the herbs I was taking, my cycles weren’t reflecting positive changes.  I had my FSH retested in October (2 months after seeing the Naturopath) fully expecting an improvement or a number similar to my previous result. To my surprise, my follicle stimulating hormone had soared to 46.  I was surprised and suspicious, but was assured by Dr. J. that the products I had been taking did not cause my FSH to increase.”

 I asked T. to tell me what exactly did the naturopath’s remedies contain. She didn’t know but when we checked one of the products called “Hormone Combinations,” it read: FSH, Testosterone, and a whole slew of other hormones. 

Serendipitously, just before T’s consultation, on my Friday afternoon break, I was re-reading for the millionth time (love this man, sorry he is no longer alive, I’d travel anywhere to hear him speak!) the following paragraph from Neil Postman’s book, Technopoly, in which he speaks of the effects of the Stethoscope, the first instrument of medical technology:

 …two of the key ideas promoted by the stethoscope: Medicine is about disease, not the patient. And what the patient knows is untrustworthy; what the machine knows is reliable.”  

 T’s story is not unique. I hear similar scenarios quite often.  Thousands of dollars spent on fertility enzymes like wobenzym, herbs labels fertility this n’ that,.herbs that you can get for fraction of the cost in your health food store, or from other trustworthy sources. Fertility herbs when taken carefully can indeed do much good, but when dispensed without rhyme or reason they can cause havoc that can take months to repair.  (Next month I look forward to welcoming a fabulous herbalist to our Guest Teacher Teleconference) 

I have  recently interviewed a couple of  integrative practitioners for fresh off the press article on DHEA Benefits and Side Effects)  and hormones in general and was reassured to hear that they were very much in line with what I’ve found to be a sensible approach to assessing the use of such fertility supplements. 

I suppose the lesson from all this is as always: no matter how higly esteemed or how useful the said fertility expert is reputed to be, you might want to know exactly what he/she is prescribing and why. Not because you don’t trust them, but because they are human beings and like all of us humanoids they’re  not omniscient.   Which is why I will also pay close attention what my Holy Human Loaf- my ultimate fertility authority has to say about the prescribed remedies. I want to be able to distinguish between possible sings of detox with a new fertility supplement regimen and side effects that are causing whacky-hormone-response.

Overall, I have found that the safest, most reliable fertility supplements are the ones that provide high quality, highly absorbable essential nutrients without specific hormonal properties. (For more detailed discussion on this topic, see my three part article on Fertility Supplements with brand recommendations.) 

Thank you, T. for asking me to share your story and inspiring this post! Have any of you had similar experiences we could all learn from?

 

 

 

Today is my 62nd birthday and this is my thank you note to the Ultimate Mom and to all of you!

 

No More Whine

 I will never complain

about the weather

or a parking space

now that You’ve declared

a place for me

in the order of things.

 I spend the day

on my knees,

ear to the ground,

listening for Your step,

lips parted,

poised to breathe You.

 Whichever note

You assign me

in the concerto of creation.

eyes on the baton

I sing.

 

Life is Always Right

 

Bow to what is,

life is always right.

After sixty years of

terrible two’s

this is what I’ve come to:

 Bow to what is!

 I bow to the pinched nerve in my arm,

it says don’t move,

I bow to the not-yet born child,

she tells me the labor has already begun.

I bow to a dread in my bones, 

it says Get up, go,

begin again!

I bow to what is 

and the harsh turns tender

I step into splendour

bowing to what is.

 

Are We Still Turning?

 Tomorrow is November 9, the day we as a community declared The International  Day of Compassion last year.

I will be honoring the day tomorrow with my Fertile Heart practice, I’ll  go to the Village Green with my sign, wear my T-shirt and engage in  conversation about the ideas that inspired the project.

Are we as a community still turning? Yes, I’d say we are, we’re without a doubt turning a challenge into an immense healing opporunity and that’s in itself a huge Turn It Around Project.

And our peace project is unfolding in its own perfect time. Slowly. Mostly because at this point, I don’t have all the neccessary resources to assume leadership of two different organizations in as active a way as I would like to.  But the idea that inspired the project is aas alive in me as the day I conceived it.   

In preparation for tomorrow, I want to make sure that I acknowledge and thank those of you who sent in signed petitions or signed the online petitions (if you’d like to sign them, we have a separate petition for US and for UK)  initiated by our wonderful European friends.

I also want to encourage you, as I encourage  myself, not to give up on the .idea of the project and most importantly on the idea that we can and must keep engaging in the work of repair; must keep growing braver to live the truth of our feelings without assaulting each other verbally, emotionally or through the horrors of warfare. We must keep turning toward a saner, healthier, more just human family one kind interaction at a time. We must gather snowflakes of compassionate behaviour in our increasingly more chaotic and troubled earth community and indeed do whatever it takes for us to become “the wave that turns the tide!”  

I’ve always loved this quote from one of the medieval Jewish Sages, Rabbi Tarfon: “The work is not yours to finish, but neither are you free to take no part in it. ”

If you’re celebrating tomorrow, you can do it with the Turn It Around Song.  /The melody is on our Turn It Around Video.

Turn It Around Song

Turn it around, turn it around,

wade in the waters and turn it around.

You be the wave that turns the tide

What we don’t see we’ll never find.

Turn it, turn it, turn it, turn it around.

Turn it around, turn it around

wade in the waters and turn it around.

You light the flame that feeds the dream

We sink or swim in a single stream.

Turn it, turn it, turn it, turn it around.

 P.S. A note to our friends in other countries who sent me signed petitions: Only citizens of each country can petition their UN ambassadors, I ccan’t do that. I’m grateful that you are joining us but you need to hold on to those petitions or I can help you  create one online.  Thank you again for all your support so far!

Could losing weight eliminate the need for IVF? 

Since we do seem to need proof of the obvious, here comes another study that shows the healthier we are the easier the baby making road.

A recent study at Guy and St. Thomas’ NHS Foundation trust published in the Journal of Human Reproduction found that higher body mass index (BMI) for women undergoing IVF treatment was linked with higher rates of miscarriage.

A study included more than 400 women who were going through IVF between 2006 and 2010, with all of the women undergoing single  blastocyst  transfer  which is linked with a higher pregnancy rate and lower miscarriage rate compared with single embryo transfer.

27 %t of the women miscarried   less than 23 weeks into their  pregnancy. Women who had a body mass index higher than or equal to 25 had more than double the risk of miscarriage.  In the group with normal BMI, 20 percent of the women miscarried. When the scientists subdivided the women into overweight and obese, they found that both groups had comparable miscarriage rates: 37 percent and 42 percent respectively.

The doctors in charge of the study were “amazed” to see such a clear connection between weight and IVF success rates.  Dr. Allan Pacey, a fertility specialist at the University of Sheffield was quoted saying that  women should aim for a healthy weight before undergoing IVF. Hmmm.  If losing a little weight could do the trick, how about aiming for a healthy body, heart and mind? Could it possibly  eliminate a need for IVF?

Then of course we also know it’s always a much more interesting story than just a story of losing the requisite pounds.  Sometimes the hungry heart needs to get the nourishment it needs and sometimes that nourishment does the trick.   As with our beautiful mom  in the Fertile Heart Video, the baby can also show up  before the weight comes off.

It’s then the baby that inspires the new mom to become healthier and thinner. (Nadine, the mom in our video has shed lots and lots of pounds since that interview)

I suppose it’s a good thing that studies are catching up with commons sense. Why should we allocate resources for cleaning up the air for these children beaming down when we can spend it on proving the obvious and then still encourage women to continue with possibly unneccessary treatment ?

Can Giuliana’s Fertility Story Save Your Life? Is her breast cancer a consequence of her fertility treatments?  How exactly is it linked to her “infertility?”

 There might be a thousand reasons for Giuliana’s breast cancer. To say that it is a direct consequence of her IVF treatments would be drawing simplistic and irresponsible conclusions. 

 And yet Giuliana’s fertility story and the stories of the three women I spoke of in my recent blog– Liz Tilberis and  Gilda Radner who died of ovarian cancer after years of fertility treatments and Wendy Wasserstein who died of a blood disease also after years of fertility treatments— are begging us to stop and pay attention.

This is an excerpt from Wendy Wasserstein’s book, Shiksa Goddess and her conversation with Dr. Drews, her fertility specialist, after he suggested that she nmove on to intermuscularly injected Perganol…”

“You know my sister has cancer.” …

“Yes, of course I know that.”

“So is this Perganol an insane thing to do?”.

“We have  no data that proves that.”…

But eventually you will.”

And we do.  In 2009, a study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology suggested that treatments for ovulation induction were linked with cancer risk. The researchers examined data from 15,030 women enrolled in the Jerusalem Perinatal Study who gave birth between 1974 and
1976 and then participated in a postpartum survey. The women were linked with the Israel Cancer Registry.  A total of 1,215 women developed cancer. The 567 women who received drug treatment to induce ovulation had a 36% increased risk of developing cancer at any site.

And what do you think Dr. Ronit Calderon-Margalit, of Hadassah-Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel, suggest as a result of their findings: “The potential implications of this study relate firstly to the need of further research and better registries of fertility treatments. ”

True, overall the research is inconsistent. A number of other studies point to no link between fertility drugs and cancer.

So perhaps a better question to ask is this :  Is it possible that anything that happens in our bodies is unrelated? How exactly do the dots in Giuliana’s story connect with regard to fertilitytreatments and their effect on her overall health, might never be revealed. But clearly her Holy Human Loaf  like mine almost twenty years ago, was asking to be heard and that call for help was muted by fertility drugs and IVF.

Is waiting for more studies the best thing we can do to guard our health? I think we can do better than that. Consider for example that the foods that boost our fertility naturally are also foods that protect us from cancer. No there are no guarantees that we’ll be immune. But we’ll be stronger to meet whatever health challenges life places in our path.   

The subtitle of The Fertile Female is How the Power of Longing for a Child Can Save Your Life and Change the World. There are many ways our unborn children are saving our lives. Mostly they’re asking us to stop, take a breath and make sure the next step we take isn’t guided by desperation or a need to silence the body’s call for help.

Dear Giuliana, we here at Fertile Heart, wish you much much healing and strength on this next step toward meeting your baby halfway!  And when you’re done with your cancer treatment, come to our Woodstock retreat!  It’s nice here, we even have a brand new juice bar, Press & Blend! It’s not just any old juice bar, it’s one that makes cold pressed organic juices with maximum nutrient and enzyme content intact and all sorts of other goodies  to support your healing.  And most important: our Fertile Heart Sisterhood is here ready to cheer you on!

Hear this dear Fertile Heart Sisterhood: Nivedita, a 28 year old young woman in Andheri India, childless after four years of marriage is “stressed” after two failed IVF cycles.

Then a benevolent Delhi based clinic’s psychologist counsels the young woman to be less “stressed” about her treatment and her infertility. She receives “stress reduction counseling,”  her anxiety about fertility treatment subsides, she celebrates a successful IVF cycle  and is now four months pregnant. A great success story! Or is it?

I’d say unless this young woman has no fallopian tubes and it doesn’t appear that this is her problem, someone should counsel Nivedita to run as fast as she can from IVF clinics and explore what it might be that’s stopping her to conceive at 28.  And if that doesn’t work and she chooses to do IVF, I’ll send a free CD to help her “de-stress.” 

I”m breathless with excitement about the arrival of Princess R’s IVF-conceived little miracle baby-boy, and cheering Morgan all the way as she prepares for her donor cycle, and grateful for  the long list of Fertile Heart- In-Vitro-babies. I know the inner work their moms have done and I know they didn’t walk away from treatment worshipping technology. 

But can we really as a species afford co-creating a culture in which younger and younger women are resorting to technology to help them get pregnant?

 This by the way is not the blog post I’d like you to do your homeplay on (it’s the Low AMH post.) But I do want to shed a little different light on these lame “stress reduction for successful IVF” stories.

 A happy open-eyed-fertile-Sunday to all!

Julia

Decoding the Mystery of  Your Infertility Diagnosis

One of the latest more confusing acronyms linked to infertility is AMH, which stands for Antimullerian Hormone. I have summarized my view of the low AMH diagnosis and my take on the current accepted treatment protocols prescribed by reproductive endocrinologists and fertility specialists in a separate document titled, Does a Low AMH Indicate  “Infertility: Getting Pregnant with Low AMH,   It’s a document based on close to 20 years of research on the link between physical, emotional and spiritual challenges to fertility. Those of you who are wrestling with a low AMH diagnosis might find it a helpful source of guidance. 

 In this post I’d like to use the latest confusion around low AMH levels as an invitation to that, which is central to the Fertile Heart™ Ovum Practice: This post is once again about the importance of doing our own thinking. It’s an invitation to use the Fertile Heart™ Ovum tools to conceive a most creative way to approach your diagnosis, whether it’s low AMH, high FSH, fibroids, elevated prolactin levels, the so called unexplained infertility or anything else in between.

 The biggest hurdle I had to overcome after my own high FSH  diagnosis almost 20 years ago, was the certainly of studies which  “proved” that my childbearing years were over.  At the time I had no models to follow. And there were no holistic or mainstream protocols that proved helpful to others with high FSH levels which I could emulate.  There was no research, no documented studies validating my growing suspicion that those FSH numbers were just a small part of my story. (Twenty years later there are still no studies to prove that.)  But some part of me was not quite ready to give up my search for more hopeful answers. and began following a hunch. Slowly but steadily hope began to peek through the clouds of desperation.

But hope is an unstable  state-of-heart.  If we don’t follow it with action, it fizzles out faster than a cluster of glistening soap bubbles.  For me, it was a mixture of despair and desire that finally propelled me to validate my hunch by following through with action. The rest of that story many of you already know. (In case you don’t, I share it in my first book, Inconceivable)  

And how does this relate to the latest “definitive” data on the link between low anti mullerian hormone levels and infertility? For that matter how does all this relate to your recent miscarriage, or your fibroids, or polycystic ovaries?

In the late nineties, I was sitting in an auditorium in Washington DC listening to a key note by Dr. Laurence Nelson.  The conference was focused on POF and Dr. Nelson was the head of the POF research at the National Institute of Health.   I was invited to teach a workshop sharing my story and the observations based on my counseling practice. I had only been teaching a few years but the research I had done throughout my own journey and the case histories of the clients who were able to conceive in spite of dire prognosis, were clues to a much more interesting story about POF than suggested by the medical dogma of the day. (the POF – Premature Ovarian Failure label was later replaced with a more politically correct POI Premature Ovarian Insufficiency label.  Now you’re not a failure, you’re just insufficient. I still like POF. Except to me it stands for Plan on Fighting. )

 After the talk the audience was invited to pose questions.  Inconceivable  had been published a couple of years earlier, and some of the women in the audience read my story.  Hands shot up and a few questions followed, most of them addressing the possibility of the link between food and reversal of symptoms, and herbal treatments that might make a difference.  Dr. Nelson,  answered pretty much every one of these questions with, “we have no studies showing a connection, more research is needed.” 

I was sitting in the back of the auditorium burning to speak. No, I had no studies either, only the picture of my daughter and the pictures of my student’s babies to validate what for me was no longer a theory: Elevated FSH levels didn’t mean the end of childbearing years. I raised my hand several times but wasn’t given the opportunity to contribute to the discussion. Thankfully, I found a way to contribute to the discussion in the years that followed and with the support of the Fertile Heart™ community I hope to continue to do so.

Almost twenty years after my diagnosis, and twelve years after that memorable POF conference Dr Nelson, who is currently the head of the Integrative Reproductive Medicine Group of NIH, along with a team of researchers published a study citing what they called a “surprising discovery.” 

This is a quote from an announcement of their findings on the NIH website. (The study was published in Fertilility and Sterility)  “W hen the scientists performed ultrasound examinations on the women with POI, they were surprised to discover that 73 percent of the women had ovarian follicles. Moreover, these follicles were capable of producing ovarian hormones.”

But hundreds of women in the last two decades have already not only known the facts validated by  this scientific discovery but gave birth to healthy babies after following a variety of treatment protocols.  Sadly for NIH, our findings are merely anecdotal evidence. So the NIH research team tells us we need to wait for more reliable data. Here is what the team of the NIH scientists recommend as they contemplate the implication of their study on elevated FSH levels: 

“The discovery that most women with primary ovarian insufficiency have immature eggs remaining in their ovaries raises the possibility of developing treatments for the infertility that accompanies the condition,” said Alan E. Guttmacher, M.D., acting director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), the NIH institute at which the study was conducted.

We are told that now there is “a possibility of treatment!”  It shouldn’t take much longer than another decade or so. How should those of us who are wrestling with “premature ovarian insufficiency” respond to the recommendations of the research team?

Do we ignore studies? Are low AMH, and high FSH  numbers meaningless? Not to me. The findings of reproductive endocrinology and fertility related research can be eminently useful. But only if we don’t stop to do our own thinking, feeling, pondering, learning  and experimenting (in a way that doesn’t harm us) and choose a most life-enhancing path to our child.  

Here is an invitation: Tell the story of your diagnosis in humaneese, a language without medical jargon. Describe what is happening in your Holy Human Loaf as you would describe it to a ten year old child.  Then explain what you think needs to happen in order for a pregnancy to become possible using the same plain language and reasoning that would make sense to a ten year old.

The ten year old wisdom-child inside you might just have some answers worthy of hearing.

The Fertile Heart Response to Serono Lab’s Educational Videos:

                                                            

How, I wonder do the birds and the bees feel about the Birds and the Bees Campaign sponsored by EMD Serono, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Gonal-f, a synthetic hormone that stimulates follicle and egg production?

Serono tells us the campaign intends to raise awareness about infertility and provide couples with the information they need to increase their chances of conceiving.

Each one of the series of videos they produced,  ends with “see a fertility specialist  now”  The unfortunate wannabe Bird-Mom in the story tells us about all the useless action she has taken, such as yoga and acupuncture, and she has done every pre-conception detox in the book, but she has yet to see a fertility expert,  the one with the real answers. 

I guess the Serono team hasn’t heard my story about the five top- of-the-line fertility specialists I’ve consulted who did have the answer, an answer based on reductive science of charts and numbers:

“With an FSH of 42 at the age of 42 you have no chance of conceiving a biological child.”   That was almost 20 years ago. Now that inconceivable baby is getting ready for her senior year of high-school. 

Sounds like they haven’t heard the stories of the millions of women who spent years injecting themselves with cocktails of Gonal-f and other creative combinations of stimulants and had nothing but cysts, bruised bodies, and in some cases, cancer, to show for it. 

The stories of the three most high profile celebrities who died after years of fertility treatments, could be  useful narratives to include in the Serone Birds and the Bees campaign. Liz Tilberis’s book, No Time to Die (ovarian cancer) or Gilda Radner’s book, It’s Always Something (ovarian cancer)  or Wendy Wasserstein’s book, The Shiksa Goddess (Blood disease)

 Interestingly, none of these beautiful, brilliant women talks about safeguarding  their health during and after treatment.  With supplements, nutritional support,  radical detox after treatment. Why not?

Is it because all the  fertility specialists  told them to do is to have regular checkups? 

Or maybe the Serono campaign could include the story of Holy Finn, the author of Baby Chase, who clearly followed faithfully the advice of the fertility experts. Holly tells us she’s had 15 rounds of unsuccessful IVF cycles.  She also says:

“I was 39 when I started treatment; I am 42 now. And still I feel lucky. Unlike many infertile people, I have the resources, though they’re not endless, to keep at it.” 

Holly also tells us that after she failed to conceive after a number of IVF attempts, when she asked her fertility specialist “whether a sane person would bother trying again?” he said there was nothing insane about what she was doing.  

 I’m thinking the birds and the bees are prepping for their own fertility awareness campaign, hoping we all can get our act together and start cleaning up the air and the water before we kill off not only the birds and the bees but countless other species. Maybe we could give  them a hand with their campaign, what do you say?  

The  Fertile Heart ™ Birds and Bees Campaign?

 Let’s cite a few real life examples on the importance of doing our own thinking. Let’s list a few examples of the answers we received from the expert fertility specialists  and our experiences with the fertility treatments that Serono tells  us will increase our chances or getting pregnant.

By all means, let’s consult a fertility specialist when the time is right, use the diagnostic tools they offer if we need them.  And I get it, that some of you feel that you really, really must take the IVF road. But for Heaven’s sake let’s remember to do our own thinking. and feeling and choosing. If you travel the IVF  road, I hope you take it with your eyes wide open, so that you can do it when you’re  ready, and not have to do it over.   And over and over.

 Just in case the next fertility expert doesn’t have all the answers we’re looking for, let’s keep educating ourselves about increasing our fertility by doing all we can to get as healthy and whole as we can. To do  not only pre-conception detox but serious post-fertility-treatment detox and to continue to use food and plants as  medicine for the rest of our lives.

 And maybe we can engage in conversation with the fertility experts who will listen to what we have to say. If you do find a specialist who’ll hear you, please let me know, our referrral list seems to be getting shorter these days. 

 I’ve seen the healing power of our incredible Holy Human Loaves and I say if a man-made drug can get you pregnant, chances are, with a little TLC from the Ultimate Mama your body could pull it off without Serono. 

 I guess this is a continuation of the Why me? theme. 

Why me? Why you?

So that we would speak up. For the birds and the bees and the babies of future generations.  

And for ourselves or course. That we don’t allow the Serono lab advertising team or any other sales team, to inject an image of ourselves as helpless victims scrambling to be rescued by the next  wizard of baby making or the next magical drug. 

Just to light a little more fire in your soul, here is an excerpt of what one of the leading fertility specialists, Dr. Norbert Gleicher, the Founder and Medical Director of the Center for Human Reproduction, President of the Foundation for Reproductive Medicine, had to say in response to Holly Finn’s story:

“I see women like her (and often older) daily at our fertility center. None of them really has reason to be down on herself, because, as individuals, women are mostly powerless in overcoming the major evolutionary developments, radically changing how we live, and, therefore, reproduce…” 

Our choice is to “be down on ourselves” like Holly, or  to be powerless like all those sad patients of Dr. Gleicher? We have no power to affect the evolution of our troubled species?    

Is that true? Are those are only options?