I was thirty-eight when we first started trying to get pregnant. It was a difficult time because I had a doctor, an internist who specialized in GYN stuff.He was my GYN doctor and my normal doctor. He actually had a heart attack right when I was trying to get pregnant, and since I had nobody else to turn to, I went to his partner, who was a nice man, but didn't really know a lot. He ran an FSH test on me, but he didn't do it at the right time so it wasn't indicative of anything.

The next doctor we saw was an OB-GYN. Dr. A. wanted to know how long we had been trying. I think it had been only six months at the time, but, I knew something was wrong because my periods were irregular-they had begun to become irregular. When I was thirty-eight-all kinds of strange things were happening. I had a few horrible periods; I had these large clots that couldn't pass through my cervix, it was almost like going through labor. The first time it happened, the doctor thought that I had had a miscarriage, but I later discovered that it was because my progesterone levels were low.

All of these doctors were telling me to wait for a year. I was already thirty-eight, and on a certain level at first I was comforted that people said that my age was nothing to worry about. I listened to them for a while, but then I would start thinking again, "Why am I listening to these people? I know that something's wrong!"

So, finally I went to Cornell, and I saw somebody there. Dr. B. looked at my tests-I was then thirty-nine and she said, "There's a good chance that you have an FSH problem." This time the tests were done correctly and my first FSH level was forty-three, really high. The next month, they ran another test and the level was 21, at which point they tried Clomid. I didn't ovulate, which was so personally devastating that I didn't want to do it any more. I didn't want to play that kind of game anymore, because it just killed me. Dr. B. also told me that my chances of getting pregnant even with fertility drugs were infinitesimal, and that it would take a miracle from God for me to have a biological child.

I actually saw somebody in-between, a friend of mine is a doctor, to get a second opinion: Same thing. They both told me my only option was a donor egg. I joined a support group shortly afterward, and Annie, one of the women in the group, told me about Julia Indichova's experience and her book. I was really inspired by it, and I said to myself, "Let me just try all this stuff - what the hell?" I had, at the same time, signed up for the donor egg program at Cornell, and had a year's wait. So I thought, "Well, I have a year to try!" So I started to try to eat only organic foods, I was juicing all the time, I stopped drinking alcohol-I didn't drink a lot before, just socially - but I completely cut it out. Coffee too. Red meat... same thing. Then, I went to an acupuncturist that Annie had gotten a card from. He was an herbalist and acupuncturist-he was so loving, and supportive. I felt he really cared about me.

He started me on herbs and acupuncture, he also put me on natural progesterone. When I started working with him my FSH was twenty-seven. The other levels weren't bad; I can't remember what they were, but they were pretty good. He basically said to me, "We'll try this for three months. If it doesn't work in three months, then this is not the way to go for you. I had just turned forty.

Three weeks into the treatment, when I was most likely to be ovulating, my husband and I went away for a long weekend at the beach and we had sex all the time. And, that's when I got pregnant. Who knows, really, what did it? All I know is that Julia's story made me feel like there were possibilities; whereas before I felt like there were none. And once I started doing all these things I started feeling a lot better. I just felt like there was hope. Michael is two months old and I'm just so grateful that I got to experience all this.