I Am More Than My Infertility

Ever wonder just how many good eggs your have? Well, now there may be a way for you to find out.

A new medical test, called Plan Ahead, is the first fertility test now being marketed that supposedly measures how many viable eggs are available for conception. The $350 test, marketed by Repromedix will be geared toward women who are trying to decide when to have children.

Dr. Benjain Leader, chief medical officer for the company, compares it to “checking the gas gauge on a car to see how much is left in the tank,” according to an article that appeared in the Orlando Sentinel. The test works by measuring three hormones closely linked to the number of eggs present in a woman’s ovaries.

There is debate, of course. Some fertility experts worry that the manufacturers are capitalizing on women’s anxieties about their biological clocks. Others say that the medical reliability of this test has not been clearly established. No matter–within the next several weeks there should be centers in about a dozen states that will be offering this test.

Marina

It’s over.

The celebration of Mother’s Day is officially passed for another year. The cards will come out of the stores, restaurants and florists will stop running those promotions, and every woman who struggles with the challenges of infertility can stop feeling hurt, resentful, or any other emotion that the event brings to the surface.

But if Mother’s Day is problem for you, hold on to a tiny piece of those emotions, to help you build empathy for others.

I am sure that Father’s Day is painful for men who are not able to have a family and that Valentines Day is not only painful for everyone who goes thorough the day alone, but is especially difficult for men and women who have experienced the loss of a beloved companion or spouse.

I also suspect that “Back to School Shopping Days” are heartbreaking to parents who have lost a child; Veteran’s Day is brutal for those who have lost someone in the military; and Thanksgiving and Christmas bring more hurt than happiness to people who face those “family holidays” alone.

The point is, we all have our days of celebration and days that we’d rather ignore. For me, as the mother of a handicapped child, there are quirky events that trigger painful emotions–like every time the television networks air Forrest Gump. That movie, which I am sure gave pleasure to millions and millions of viewers, always strikes me as a parody of a situation that really isn’t funny; an unrealistic view of mentally handicapped people.

But then I realize that it really isn’t all about me and I shouldn’t deny the rest of the world’s right to laugh at, and with Forrest, just because it dredges up complex emotions in me.

Mother’s Day doesn’t have to be painful. Just let it go. Think of it as a holiday for someone else, and then ignore it the way you ignore Hanukkah if you are not Jewish or Easter if you are not Christian.

You should see how fast I can switch the channel when somebody starts talking about life being like a box of chocolates.

Linda

When it comes to overall rejuvenation of body, mind and soul, I don’t think it gets much better than yoga. However, a recent article in the Yoga Journal (May 2008), revealed that more and more women are turning to yoga to improve their fertility. In her article, “Fertile Ground,” author Denise Kersten Wills related that the classes emphasize breath, relaxation and opening the muscles around the hips and pelvis.

But underneath all this breathing and stretching is the message of the yogic philosophy: stop trying to control the process. The ‘letting go’ fostered by this approach helps to reduce anxiety and stress, factors that are known to raise the likelihood of infertility.

Yoga is not a magic cure all, and certainly can’t change diagnosed physical issues. But according to yoga teacher Tami Quinn, co-founder of Pulling Down The Moon, a holistic fertility center in Chicago, yoga can help with hormone regulation, stress levels and blood-flow issues. According to Quinn, “The East-meets-West approach is the fastest way to meet your goal.”

If you are interested in exploring yoga for fertility, you have some options. Two videos that can get you started on a home-based practice are, “Yoga 4 Fertility,” with Brenda Strong, and “Fertility Yoga,” with Jolyon Cowan. And Fully Fertile is a new book by the Pulling Down the Moon staff.

Marina

Here is a video from last year’s Yoga Journal Conference:

According to ShowBizSpy.com Victoria Beckham (aka Posh Spice) is hoping to conceive her fourth child, and is eating red chili peppers to increase her chances of fertility.

She and her husband, David Beckham, have three sons and rumors say they would very much like to have a daughter. The article says: “Red chillies are recommended because they ’spice’ things up in the fertility department by increasing the flow of blood around the body, ensuring that the reproductive system gets a healthy supply,” according to website askbaby.com.

“Chillies also stimulate endorphin production which means that more fertility boosting, stress releasing, happy hormones circulate around your body.”

But Victoria’s nutritionist has banned red meat and told her to cut down on dairy products.”

Can eating red chili peppers really increase your chances of becoming pregnant? Perhaps, because a good, healthful diet improves your chances of conceiving, as does maintaining a healthy body weight and living a balanced life. But, none of these factors will “cure” infertility. Think of them as ways to tip the odds, but don’t expect any one lifestyle change to be a magical answer.

Follow this link to read more about research from Northwestern University on the overall medical benefits of eating hot peppers.

And check this past post on I Am More Than My Infertility blog:

Your Diet and Your Fertility

Linda

When you’re in the midst of infertility treatment, it’s easy to get a little lost.. Often, this is because trying “one more thing,” can easily outweigh the cost to your own well-being.

The following questionnaire appeared in my Emotionally Speaking column in Conceive Magazine a couple of years back. The Yes/No Questionnaire is a good thing to have on hand and for you and your partner to take at regular intervals. It can help you step outside yourself and assess whether it’s time to take a break, or even put an end to treatment and consider alternatives.

1. Do you often find yourself mentally and emotionally tired?

2. Are you losing hope about the outcome of your medical treatment? Do you assume failure to guard yourself against disappointment?

3. Does it seem as if your whole world has become about infertility and that little else matters?

4. Do you find yourself irritable and resentful on the days when you have a doctor’s appointment? Are you resisting following medical instructions?

5. Imagine that your doctor has just informed you that a new groundbreaking treatment has been discovered. Do you wish you didn’t know?

6. Are you feeling resentful that you have had to give up other things to pursue treatment?

7. Is there more tension, arguing, or just isolated silence between you and your partner? Has your relationship lost its energy and joy?

8. Are your money reserves getting dangerously low, putting you at financial risk?

9. Do you find yourself feeling desperate, pursuing treatment against medical recommendation, or willing to pursue pregnancy at any price?

10. Is the idea of being a parent becoming more important to you than being pregnant?

11. Does an end to the demands of treatment and a “return to normal” sound like a relief?
12. Do you look in the mirror and find it hard to remember who you were before, or hard to recognize who you’ve become?

If you find that you’ve answered ‘yes’ to a majority of these questions, it may be time for you to consider ending treatment and reassessing your goals. Even if you’ve only answered ‘yes’ to a few of the questions, you should see these responses as red flags signaling the need to take stock of where you are and strongly consider taking a break from treatment.

Marina

Learn more techniques to help you deal with the challenges of infertility in our book, I Am More Than My Infertility: 7 Proven Tools for Turning a Life Crisis Into a Personal Breakthrough.

www.IAmMore.net

When Marina and I wrote our book, I Am More Than My Infertility: 7 Proven Ways to Turn a Life Crisis Into a Personal Breakthrough, we were very upfront about the fact that we wrote the book for women.

It’s not that infertility isn’t a life crisis for men. It’s just that the way men and women deal with infertility is very different, because, quite simply, the way it affects men is very different than the way it affects women. This difference is so important, that it is the main topic of Chapter 2 in our book. And we weren’t diminishing how traumatic fertility challenges are to men who want to be dads, we just didn’t feel like one book could properly tackle both sides of this already complex issue.

So…I was very interested to learn about Matthew M. F. Miller. He writes a blog called, “Maybe Baby“. It’s a very good blog where he looks at life, at fertility and infertility, and talks about how much he wants to become a father.

If you have never been to his infertility blog before, be sure you visit.

Linda

Many women know Cindy Margolis as an actress and model. Women who have faced infertility issues usually know that she went to extraordinary lengths to have her children.

In Margolis’ book, Having a Baby…when the Old-Fashioned Way Isn’t Working: Hope and Help for Everyone Facing Infertility, she writes very candidly about her journey to build a family. Beliefnet.com carried an interview with her recently. You can read the interview in its entirety by clicking here.

Here is an portion of the interview we thought would interest the readers of the I Am More Than My Infertility blog:

Q. You conceived your son after several grueling rounds of IVF, and then you had your daughters through a surrogate. Do you think there’s any one right way to cope with infertility?

A. I don’t, and that’s the best part about it. It’s what’s right for you. There are so many options available to you, everything from insemination all the way to in vitro fertilization. There is surrogacy, and that’s another thing that people don’t really understand. People saw a Lifetime movie one time where the surrogate ran away with the baby, and everybody freaks out. And that cannot be further from the truth. With my surrogate it was a wonderful, amazing experience. Most surrogate stories are just so heartwarming. Could you imagine any more precious gift than giving someone the gift of life? A virtual stranger, who, in their heart, is a true angel and all they want to do is to help other families who couldn’t conceive on their own. I tell Shannon, my surrogate, “You can go rob a bank or kill someone, it doesn’t even matter, you’re getting into heaven because you were an angel to carry those two precious, beautiful girls for us.”

Linda

I will share what I have read, and leave you to draw your own conclusions.

The Herald Sun, an Australian online newspaper has reported on a study that cites IVF as increasing infertility in future generations.

According to the article, there has been a 30 percent increase in fertility therapies, meaning, (according to this article) that, “…infertile couples are passing on their defective genes and infertility is being embedded in the national DNA.”

The article cites growing infertility figures in Australia and around the world, saying, “A new international study has found sperm counts and birth rates are declining in developed countries, including Australia.” The article cites research done in university hospitals in Denmark and in the US and says that infertility now affects about 15 percent of couples trying to conceive.

But the statements I found most disturbing were these, “IVF and other techniques mean many sub-fertile couples who would have been forced to remain childless a generation ago can now have families…In the past, a woman with normal fertility would have had little chance of becoming pregnant if her partner suffered from such severe sperm problems - most of which are linked to defective genes. But the scientists say these genes are perpetuated as a result of the success of IVF.”

The article does go on to state that not all infertility problems are gene-related and those that are not are obviously not transmitted to future generations in this way.

…Nevertheless, it is a new and disturbing twist to the already complex issue of infertility, and leaves us all with one more thing to think about.

Linda

Let’s face it, anyone who has ever dealt with infertility can tell you how it can literally turn everything you believed to be true about yourself and your world on its head.

Lately, I have been working with several high-achieving, Type A clients who are really struggling with this turmoil. Even though on the surface, these women look different from one another, they share some common traits. All of them come from backgrounds where there was struggle, and they saw their ability to be successful as a way out of what they came from. All of them have learned that the way to achieve in life is to focus on the goal, pull out all the stops, and work as hard as possible to make it happen. And finally, all of them have experienced success with this formula, actualizing many dreams by pure grit and effort–until now.

The realization that this formula often does not offer a solution to infertility can hit a woman hard. Feelings of loss and confusion are not uncommon. It may feel scary to shift gears when the old way has seemingly worked for so long.

And yet, infertility can open the door to another kind of wisdom as well. As powerful as a woman can be, pushing hard is not the only way this power can express. Sometimes power is about being soft and gentle with life and with one’s self. Sometimes power is about letting go, and making space for a different way of being than you have ever experienced before.

If you find yourself pushing hard against one closed door after another, stop and take a breath. Ask yourself, “What do I really need right now?” And then, maybe for the first time in a long time, listen for that still, small voice inside you. The answers may surprise you.

One of the all too often themes that women who struggle with infertility experience is a sense that their body is betraying them.This is sad because rather than supporting your body through this process, it becomes easy to feel angry at your body, and alienated from yourself. Finding a way out of this destructive cycle, and reconnecting with your body, becomes an important part of the healing process.

Not long ago, one of my clients came upon a way to do this that really seemed to work for her. Carmen has always been a physically active person, and throughout her fertility treatment, had continued to do some jogging, with her doctor’s permission and under his supervision. In the past weeks, however, she had gotten into a funk and stopped doing everything, which only seemed to worsen her depression.

One day, her best friend called her on a spur of the moment, and asked her if she wanted to run a local 5K coming up that weekend. “My first thought was, ‘No way, I don’t want to move,’” recalled Carmen. “But my friend kept prodding me, so I thought, ‘What the heck, even if I can’t run the whole thing, I could walk it.’ So I went and you’ll never believe what happened. We got there, and it was crowded, so I decided to go off and kind of stay behind the pack. I started off slow, and was able to move into a slow jog after a while. About midway through the race, my body relaxed into a nice even clip, and seemingly out of nowhere, I heard a voice in my head saying, ‘I can count on my body!’ over and and over again, keeping time with my running. I was probably one of the ones who finished last, but by the end of the race, I felt so good about myself. It was amazing! It was the first time since I can remember that I felt good about my body, proud of what it was able to do. I remembered that I can count on my body.”

You don’t have to run a race to make the connection that Carmen did. The idea is to do something, anything, that moves your body and lets you remember that it has worth and value–learning a new dance step, stretching into a yoga class, even going for a leisurely walk. Just keep reminding yourself of the miracle that your body is–and celebrate it any way you can.

Marina

We like to share videos we find on the internet with our blog readers. When we do, we are not usually endorsing their message nor are we criticizing it. The I Am More Than My Infertility Blog is just a good place for women to express themselves and exchange thoughts on their experience with infertility and fertility challenges, adoption, pregnancy, self-help, and other related topics.

Here is are a couple of videos that may interest you:

Lisa, who writes the blog, “Infertile Ground” wrote to us about our recent post titled, “Dealing With Tense Topics Related to Infertility“.

While her words also appear under the comments section of an older post called, “I Am More Than My Infertility: Asking For Help from Our Readers,” we were afraid some of our readers would miss them there. And because what she wrote is so personal and insightful, we thought all the readers of the I Am More Than My Infertility Blog would benefit from it.

So Lisa, thank you for reading and thank you for sharing. Here is what Lisa had to say:

“I had to comment, because I do see myself in those words, yet I’ve been lucky enough that people haven’t treated me any differently AND that I haven’t had major problems with hearing others’ good news. I do think it’s important to acknowledge, though, that individuals have unique reactions to every circumstance. And many, many people facing long-term infertility do indeed find it almost impossible to handle talk of easy conceptions, birth stories, pregnancy and baby milestones, or children in general. I know where they’re coming from. I think it’s understandable, then, that some people react by trying to protect the infertile woman/couple from painful news. When you’re the one in the role of Infertile, it’s important to remind yourself that probably everyone is doing the best they can with the information and communication skills they possess.

My personal take on existing in a mostly fertile world? Infertility has been very painful for me. In my mind, though, one person’s (or, let’s face it, just about everyone else’s) ability to conceive has nothing to do with my infertility. Someone else being fertile isn’t what makes me infertile. And that distinction helps me cope.

Do I sometimes wince for a second when I get a pregnancy announcement or see an infant or a beautiful pregnant belly? Of course I do. I am human. And some days I am way more human on that front than others! But thankfully I haven’t yet wanted to be cut off or “sheltered” from what’s happening around me. Friends and family who know about our struggles to conceive have continued — as far as I know — to comfortably share baby news, children anecdotes, etc., with me, and I appreciate that. Of course those who don’t know do, too; no reason not to. I can really imagine, though, that if word somehow leaked to acquaintances or coworkers who don’t know me well, that it might be natural for many of them to think I wouldn’t want to hear anyone celebrating someone else’s good news. I have a slightly different take than the guest columnist in that while I’d welcome anyone asking me my preferences, I just don’t see expecting that to happen.”

The other day, I was flipping through the Orlando Sentinel my town’s local newspaper, and came across a infertility article in the advice column, “Tell Me About It” (Thursday, April 3 issue). The columinist, Carolyn Hax, was away on vacation, so she turned her advice over to one of her readers.

Spoken like one who has been there, this reader, who signed off as Anywhere, beautifully shared her own perspective, and took issue with the assumptions that people make. Perhaps you too can see yourself in her words..

“On Infertility

Not all of us dealing with infertility are incapable of hearing about, celebrating, and enjoying others pregnancies. I completely understand women who are having difficulty–but pay attention to the woman before deciding to keep her out of the loop.

I’m tired of having ultrasound pictures hidden from me as I walk into a room. I just learned of a far-away relation’s pregnancy three days after the birth of her child because people ‘couldn’t bear’ to tell me she was pregnant. What a crock! I love kids. I do not begrudge anyone the joy of having them, anticipating them, celebrating them.

People, if you’re close enough to know a person is having fertility issues, you’re close enough to ask, “Do you want to see/be invited/hear about…” in relation to baby stuff. Thank you.”

“Womb for Rent” So read the cover story in the April 7 issue of Newsweek Magazine . As advances in science have brought greater acceptance, surrogacy has become big news. There’s even a movie about surrogacy coming out in the spring called, “Baby Mama.” But unfortunately, the movie reinforces a stereotype (rich, successful, infertile woman contracts an unemployed, deceptive surrogate in search of easy money), which, as it turns out, is largely untrue.

Surprisingly, the Newsweek article relates that the reason women choose to be a surrogate are as varied as the women themselves. Some make this choice to gain empowerment and self-worth. Others, who are full-time moms and strapped for money, see the average payment of $20,000 or $25,000 as a way to help their family financially. Still others see this as a way to bring joy to others and make a difference in the world. “Being a surrogate is like giving an organ transplant to someone,” says Jennifer Cantor, “only before you die, you actually get to see their joy.”

In states like Texas and California, military spouses make up about 50 percent of their carriers. For many of these women, their choice is a combination of altruism and finances. One wife parallels her choice to that of her husband overseas, “…a risk with my life and body to help someone.” And again, the payment from one pregnancy is often more than their husbands’ annual base pay.

For many of these women and the couples for whom they carry, this choice is truly a win win.

Marina

Photo credit:Jenny Rollo(C)

“In the ten years that I have known Marina Lombardo, I have watched her powerfully touch lives through her private practice, seminars, and writings. She is an authentic leader, in that she lives what she teaches and shares in this dynamic book. Whether you are struggling with fertility issues, or have just lost your way in life, her straightforward, creative approach is a welcome relief for those searching for answers today.”

–H. Wayne McKamie, Jr, L.P.C., L.C.S.W., President and Founder of Focus Seminars of K.C. Inc.

www.IAmMore.net