Erica Hoke walks through fertility tests doctors often skip before IVF or IUI. She shares her own Factor V Leiden diagnosis and a story about Constance, whose husband had an undiagnosed balanced translocation that caused repeated failed cycles. Get copies of your lab results and track them.
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Good morning. Hopefully you can hear me this time. I am gonna mess around with my technology here and make sure that you can hear me this time because I just did this. Let's see. Okay, everything looks good. Hopefully you can hear me this time. Technology. Okay, so I'm hoping, I'm hoping from the title that you will definitely get a lot out of this video, 'cause this is something that is very important to me. I hear this all the time from people that they believe that their doctor has tested them for everything. They say, "Surely, you know, my doctor knows what they're doing, and whatever tests I need, they're going to have given me." and all of that kind of stuff. I am still messing with my technology, just so you know. All right, at the risk of looking like an incompetent person, I don't know what to say. I just want to make sure that you get this information because it's so important. So at the risk of, um, Okay, I'm coming, I'm coming. Okay, I'm not gonna find my notes. I just did this live, it didn't go, nobody could hear. So anyway, did your doctor really test you for everything? I hear it all the time and— okay, audio is good. Thank you, friends, for supporting me. I hear this all the time from people. They truly believe in their hearts that the doctors have tested them for everything. And so many times I hear after the fact, so after failed IVF, after failed IUIs, after miscarriages, the doctor will come back and say, well, you know, we didn't test you for this, we can go down this path. And nobody that is going through infertility wants that as an answer from their doctor. So I've advocated for this a lot, um, on other videos, but I'll just remind you that I really strongly advocate for you to get a copy of your own tests. For you to know what tests have been done, for you to look at your own tests and do your best to interpret them. Normally when you get tests from the lab or from a doctor, they will have a range on there. And so you can kind of see, um, if you want to be really detailed, you can make a spreadsheet or somehow otherwise track it so that you can see if your levels are going up or going down. And these are all things that you would think that the doctors would track, and they're most likely not doing that. They're most not likely not going into that kind of detail in your medical procedures. They have a standard protocol and it's only after something doesn't work that a lot of times they will come back and say, let's try this, let's try that. Sometimes that means you've gone through a miscarriage. Sometimes that means that you have gone through multiple failed procedures. Sometimes that means that you have spent, you know, upwards of $100,000 like my friend Constance, who is one of my contributing authors in Infertility Success: Stories of Help and Hope for Your Journey that's coming out this month. So Constance's story is both amazing and heartbreaking. She does get her happy ending, but one of the things that she went through is she went through— okay, are you holding on to your seat? She went through 6 failed IUI procedures and 2 failed IVF procedures, and then, and subsequent miscarriages that were, that were associated with those. And then the doctor said to her, well, maybe we should do genetic testing on your embryos. Okay. She actually lost the opportunity to use her own eggs and ended up using donor eggs because they did not do genetic testing on the embryos prior to these procedures. Not to mention the thousands and thousands, you know, upwards of $100,000 that she spent on these procedures. It wasn't until they failed that the doctors came back and said to her, let's test the embryos. Well, they ended up finding— not, not the embryos, not testing the embryos, the sperm. They ended up finding that her husband had something called balanced translocation disorder that was affecting the embryos. And had that been tested upfront, um, she had low ovarian reserve, low AMH. Had that been tested for upfront, the balanced translocation disorder, she would have had the opportunity to use her own eggs. She at least would have had a chance. But as it was, they used up the last 6 good eggs that they were able to retrieve, and that was what she was left with— the heartbreak of knowing that she could have had a different outcome. She did get her happy ending, and you know, all's well that ends well, maybe, except for, you know, it would have been, it would have been a missed, it was a missed opportunity for her. So my story also is similar in that if I had found out sooner that I had Factor V Leiden, which is a blood clotting disorder, I have a video here if you're watching on YouTube, there's a whole video on Factor V, and I was diagnosed with Factor V after I had a blood clot in my leg. I had already seen a reproductive endocrinologist and they did not test me for the blood clotting disorders. Now I do hear from my clients and from the community that they're doing— REIs are doing a better job for doing these blood clotting panels and things like that. It's getting a little bit more mainstream and they're adding that into their protocol. But for me, it definitely would have shortened that amount of time and honestly, I would have never gotten tested for it. So that blood clot literally changed the course of my fertility because I 100% believe if I had not gotten tested for— if I hadn't gotten the blood clot in my leg and gotten the testing, then I would have never known. And I was having chemical pregnancies. Factor V is really interesting, and I'll let you watch the video, but in a nutshell, it can cause primary infertility, It can cause secondary infertility, primary infertility. It can cause very early implantation issues, which is what was happening with me. I was having a lot of chemical pregnancies that I didn't know about. It can cause second and third trimester loss because of clotting in the placenta or in the, in the cord. And it can cause secondary infertility, which is super confusing to people because they say to me all the time, How could I have factor V, have had a child, and now this is causing secondary infertility? And the answer to that is, is that as your body ages, you deal less well, it copes less well with the increased estrogen of pregnancy, and that can contribute to clots, again, the same way, either early on or causing repeat miscarriage. So those things, are things that you want to make sure that everything that you know about, and I'm going to put together a list too of, um, uh, missed testing and misdiagnosed and things like that, tests that you want to make sure that are in your doctor's protocol before you spend the money on IVF, before you spend the money on IUI, because they're super common too, by the way. These things are easily fixed and super common. So if you want to hear the rest of Constance's story, if you want to hear the rest of my story, the book is coming out this month. I'm super excited. It's 19 stories of infertility success after a lot of different scenarios. So some nat— nat pro technology, some reproductive technology. Some of us like myself, I couldn't do reproductive medicine because I didn't have enough eggs for them to retrieve. And so my last son was born 7 years after I was told that I would need donor eggs and that I had a 1% chance of conceiving. So if you want the rest of that story, I dropped the waitlist in the description. If you're watching on YouTube and you want more content like this, I'm live every Monday, Wednesday, Friday at noon. If you're watching on Facebook and you want to get notified when I go live, go ahead and go over to YouTube and hit that like and subscribe so you get notified, because Facebook doesn't like to do that. All right, I will see you Wednesday at noon. Health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.
