Dr. Tabatha Barber had repeated IVF failures after a pregnancy complicated by chorioamnionitis. She suspected a lingering uterine infection, got antibiotics, and became pregnant. Her intuition about inflammation in the upper pole of her uterus turned out to be right.
I've got to figure this out. And I'll never forget that reproductive endocrinologist came back to me and said, you were right. But I had chorioamnionitis with my— and so, you know, I had—
So you had an infection inside the womb during the pregnancy.
But after having him, I thought, you know, would having this infection inhibit me from conceiving again? People with chorioamnionitis get pregnant easily. Well, it could be that you had Group B strep. It could be STDs, right? If you've had an infection in there, that can inhibit embryo implantation moving forward. So if you're struggling with secondary infertility, as I was, I just— I encourage the listeners to follow your intuition because I just felt like I had the numbers. They kept deploying these embryos and they weren't taking. And so in the back of my head, I thought, what if this chorioamnionitis is part of the implantation failure? And so I actually asked for a uterine biopsy. I said, go up there, biopsy my tissue, like, try to figure out if that's the problem. And they kind of were nonchalant and they finally, like, conceded to it and did it. And the biopsy was negative. And so I said, okay, I guess I'll put that hypothesis to rest. But these embryos kept failing. And so I got to the point where I said I had brown bleeding after my cycles, and brown bleeding can be a sign that there is an underlying infection. Like, I've got to figure this out. And I'll never forget that reproductive endocrinologist came back to me and said, you were right. You were right. The upper pole of my uterus where they were deploying all those embryos with IVF was totally inflamed.
I had endometritis.
As a result of that prior chorioamnionitis infection. So had I not followed my intuition, like, and who begs for surgery? Like, I was basically like, open me up, you know, figure this out. But I mean, after I— there are a couple other variables we can get to, but after taking antibiotics to clear that infection, I got pregnant. So that was clearly a major hindering variable.
