Asking for More Testing Led to My Pregnancy

Hi, I'm Erica Hoke. I'm a fertility, uh, coach and I had a 1% chance of getting pregnant and now I have 4 boys. So what we're talking about today, I want to share a little bit about my story because I feel like it's really important to, to have, um, some perspective about what it took for me to get from being told that I would need donor eggs, that I was never going to be able to conceive on my own to getting pregnant naturally, um, through diet and lifestyle changes, traditional Chinese medicine and acupuncture. So I want to talk to you about talking to your doctor about additional testing and what I did to, um, dig deep into my medical history and work out what was going on with my body. So the part of the story that I forgot to mention just a minute ago was I was over 35 when all this was going on. Um, I was over 35 when I got that diagnosis of needing donor eggs. And so I, after going through a period of time of disbelief and grieving, I just hit the ground running. I was researching like crazy, like so many of you are. And I just started taking a multi-pronged approach to how I was going to get to the bottom of my, of my infertility and how I was going to get pregnant. I, I did not allow myself to be deterred. And so one of the things that I did is I went back into my medical records and I found I was on thyroid medicine. I found my thyroid numbers from when I was— before I was symptomatic. So from a few years previous, before my thyroid started to like take a tank, um, and I started to need Synthroid. It was actually a fertility medicine that like burnt my thyroid up, but that's a conversation for a whole nother day. But I, I went and found that baseline number for myself, and I went to my doctor, my endocrinologist, um, who specializes in thyroid and other conditions. Um, and I said to him, listen, I'm still kind of symptomatic. I don't feel as great as I want to. What if we just tweaked my thyroid medicine a little bit to this pre-symptomatic range? Um, every single time I got pregnant from then on out, it— my range had to be within that very small, very specific window. And I say that to you because thyroid numbers are like a football field, but I'm not going to go into that today. I'm not going to do any training on that because I talk a lot about that. So he did give me a little pushback, I will tell you, because that number, um, for most people is on the high side, which means it's on the low side. Thyroid is so crazy. Um, it was, uh, in the, the higher range. And so it's not a number that they kind— they kind of don't like people to like sit there. But I knew from the symptoms that I was having that my body wasn't happy. And so, um, again, every time I got pregnant, it was in that very narrow window of my thyroid being within that certain range. So that was one of the things that I advocated for myself. And, you know, um, I had a good relationship with that doctor. He and I had been working together for a long time. It wasn't like a big— wasn't like a lot of pushback is what I'm trying to say, because that's what people say to me all the time. They're like, hey, these are doctors, they went to school for this. And I'm like, yeah, and you are in your body and you know how you feel, and you also have dysfunction and dysregulation and dis-ease in your body in the form of reproductive problems. So we have to do something different in order to get a different result. A lot of my clients have gotten to the end of the road or into their rope, one or the other or both, in terms of finances or opportunities, or just don't know where to turn next. We have to do something different, right? So the other, the other thing that I want to tell you about is that I had multiple laparoscopic surgeries. Um, I'm not going to get TMI here with you this morning, but I had multiple laparoscopic surgeries, and I had my last surgery after being told that the other two surgeries were perfectly fine. They went in, they did through my belly button, they did the laparoscopy, they did the hysteroscopy through my vagina, they did the whole thing. They didn't see any fibroids. They didn't see any problems. They didn't see anything. So a few months would go by. So in between the, you know, the first surgery and the second surgery, nothing here. Okay, well, we're gonna try again. We'll do it a little bit different way. Still nothing. Still don't see anything. Um, I can't remember the exact time frame, but I had to, and I went back to my doctor. I'm like, listen, I know that something's wrong with me. I'm having I'm having terrible pain. I'm having all these symptoms. You can't tell me that there's nothing wrong. So he's— I said, what can we do? What can we do there? What other test is there? He said, well, you can go back to your fertility doctor and you can ask him for this test. And this test is a saline sonogram infusion. So they fill your uterus with saline. And that allows, um, the fibroids to come out of the uterine wall. And lo and behold, you guys, lo and behold, I had so many fibroids in my uterus, um, wall that had retracted from during the other two surgeries that they couldn't see them. They took out like a whole handful of fibroids, and that was kind of scary in itself too, right? Because you know, the scarring from taking the fibroids out, could be implantation problems. But I knew that none of that mattered because I wasn't getting pregnant. I had to do something different. I had to take a little bit of risk. I had to keep asking the questions. And so I'm a little bit over time this morning, but that's what I want to say to you. I just wanted to say a little bit about my story to you, to advocate for yourself, to keep digging for questions, If you want to, um, book a call with me, I have a free 30-minute, um, consultation that I do in two parts where you and I put together a roadmap for you to go forward. It's not a sales call in any way, shape, or form. So if you want to hop on that, I put the link below in the comments. And also, um, I have a support group where we talk about these things and advocacy, and that is Infertility Empowered, and that link is there too. So health and blessings to you. I'll catch you later. Bye-bye.