How I FINALLY Conquered My Infertility

Today I'm Erica Hoke. I'm a fertility coach and I am a super optimistic person, which is most of the reason why I'm always late and my technology, it may actually hate me. So I don't want to waste any more time talking about our subject today, which is how I finally conquered my infertility. If you don't know my story, I had a stunning 1% chance of of conceiving all after the age of 35. I had 4, 4, um, I had 4 children after the age of 35 and after being given a 1% chance of getting pregnant. Um, as if that wasn't crazy enough or enough of a big enough story, I actually also had 7 different fertility diagnosis. And so, um, I'm going to tell you today the 3 steps that I took that I feel like fundamentally really helped me overcome and conquer my infertility. The first one is, is I listened to my body. And when I say I listened to my body, I listened to not only how I felt, but also my intuition about what was going on. Um, I had actually two, uh, uterine fibroid surgeries. That were unsuccessful. And I say that they're unsuccessful— this is just an example of how I listen to my body— I say that they were unsuccessful because when I came out of surgery, they said, um, the first time they said that they found nothing at all, like nothing. The second surgery, the second laparoscopic surgery, they found just a few, um, very small fibroids and it was, um, nothing that would take care of my symptoms in the long run. So I had these two laparoscopic surgeries, I still had symptoms. If you have fibroids, you know what that's like, um, in brief detail: very painful, super heavy periods, lots of clotting. So I, I wasn't going to take that as an answer. I had already addressed my endometriosis Um, and I knew that something had to be behind these super heavy periods and this, um, great amount of pain that I was in every month. And so I kept asking, what else can we do? What— how else can we figure out what's going on? The end result of that was a saline ultrasound, um, much less common back when I was trying to conceive my first son, but more common now. I hear women talking a little bit about— more about it now in the infertility world. But they basically blow up your— fill your uterus with saline. And what happens is, is that allows the fibroids not to retract into the uterine wall lining, but to kind of just hang out and float. It has that buoyancy. And so they actually took a whole handful. It, it looked like aquarium gravel. It was stunning. They had— I had so many fibroids in there. And if you are in the infertility world, you know that that comes with its own like scariness to it, right? Like, they just took out over 20 fibroids. They were small, but there was a lot of them. So they took out over 20 fibroids. So am I gonna have any space in my uterus? Am I going to have any real estate in my uterus for implantation? Clearly the answer to that is yes, I did. So I would say listen to your body, not only one, how you're feeling, um, but also if you are— if you continue to be symptomatic, um, then push for additional answers and additional testing. Okay, number 2, I took control over what was actually in my control. I took responsibility for what I was putting in my body in terms of my diet. And I'm a lot more crunchy now than I was back then. So in hindsight, it wasn't, it wasn't huge changes. Okay. I cleaned up my diet. I started making my proteins organic. I started doing traditional Chinese medicine. I reduced my stress also with acupuncture, massage, yoga, things like that, added visualization. So anything that was in my control, I tried to address it to the best of my ability, which kind of leads me to my third point. Um, I didn't allow the medical community to impose their agenda on me in terms of time or procedures, um, in terms of doing things linearly. A lot of times Doctors will like, well, we're going to do this, and then if that doesn't, you know, work out, then we're going to do this. I did it all at once. If you've met me, that's my personality. I want to do it all at once. I want to get it done. I want to find answers. I'm sure that that's you too. Okay, so I didn't allow them to put that linear timeline on me. I got additional testing while I was doing Chinese medicine. I was seeing my OB-GYN and a fertility doctor and getting second opinions. I was doing as much as I could as fast as possible, and I just kept digging for information. So those are 3 of my biggest, like, foundational things that I did to conquer my infertility. If you'd like more information about my— if you'd like to hear the rest of my story and more about my story, I actually published a book in the fall with 19 other ladies called Infertility Success: Stories of Help and Hope for Your Journey. And I want to— sorry, that was weird. Um, I want to, um, encourage you to take a look at that. It's available on Amazon. I dropped the link here. And, uh, the stories in there are just incredible in terms of the diversity. Some of us had, um, some of us used donor eggs, some of us went the natural route like I did. There's all manner of stories in there. And after each story, I'm just going to grab my book here because I want to show you. After each of the stories, there is a, there is a QR code that you can click on and it's going to give you a resource. This is Laura, and her story is incredible. But everybody put a resource in there so that if you really resonate with the story, that you can connect with us on a personal level. And we have a resource for you related to your story. All right, thanks for your patience today and health and blessings to you. I will catch you next week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday live. Bye-bye.