Infertility: 3 Questions to ask about your Thyroid Health

Hello everyone, happy one. I am Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and an empowerment coach. So one of the things that we're gonna talk about today is thyroid health. So before I forget though, before we get into the topic today, let me just ask a favor. If you are watching this in replay, will you just hit me a hashtag replay on there so that I know you've been here? Excuse me. And if you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that like and subscribe button so that you get notified when I go live again next time. Okay, you guys, thyroid health comes up all the time in conversations in the infertility world, right? And people will often say to me, Erica, my doctor said my labs are completely normal. What am I supposed to do? Like everything has come back normal. I have unexplained infertility. I've had my thyroid panel done. What else is there? What am I missing? So, sorry guys. Thyroid health is really impactful to your fertility. And so what I want you to know, the great big elephant in the room is that the thyroid function acceptable range is like a football field long. So here's my number one tip for you to get to a place that you feel good, right? Um, so let's talk about range history. So what does that mean? First of all, let's just be very clear, I am not a doctor, and that's a good thing for you because the doctors could not help me get pregnant and I have four sons. So I am giving you all of my best tips through my gargly voice this morning that I can't get rid of. Sorry. Also, I don't have my mic on, so I don't know how well you can hear me. The Lord works in mysterious ways. Okay, I touched my mic when I went to cough. All right, sorry, and you didn't have to listen to me cough into the mic. Let's talk about range and range history. So if you have thyroid levels that have come back normal and you feel like that, that could be a contributing factor, or you wanna make sure it's not a contributing factor, this is what I want you to do. I want you to either go in that patient portal or pull your old paperwork out, or get a copy of your paperwork, your history for the past 5 years, because a lot of times people will have over the course of physicals and things like that, they'll have some thyroid panels done. So I want you to do a little digging and investigating and see if you can find what your history was, um, for your thyroid level a year ago, 2 years ago, 3 years ago, 4 years ago, 5 years ago, because what you're gonna find is that thyroid disease doesn't show up like that in one minute. It progresses over time, and so you can see that history. By the way, your doctor is not going to do that. Your doctor is not going to look at any historical numbers and say, "Well, 3 years ago you were here, and now this year you're here, but you're still in normal range." If they see that normal range, most doctors are gonna just say, "Well, you're normal." So let's talk about the second point. How are you feeling? Okay, thyroid symptoms range from extreme fatigue, weight loss issues that are not related to calorie intake or exercise, hair loss, dry skin, brittle nails, like take an inventory of how you're feeling and really like assess if those things could be linked to an underactive thyroid, okay. This is one of the, I believe, the biggest overlooked contributing factors to thyroid and infertility issues. Um, I always have my clients make sure that they have been tested for the Epstein-Barr virus. Now, the Epstein-Barr virus, if you do not have an active infection, will only show that you have antibodies in your blood, which means that you have a past infection. You could— could you have like a current infection? Yes, you could, but you would probably know it. Epstein-Barr virus is also known as mono. So if you have ever been diagnosed with mono or ever suspected that you had mono as a teenager, as a college student, or any of— any time in your life, that is definitely a test that you want to get. Now I'm going to show you this book I've got no skin in the game with this. This is, can you see it? Can you see it? All right, oh, I'm in my lights. So this is, okay, Thyroid, The Medical Medium Thyroid Healing. All right, so I'm just gonna read you some of the topics in here in the thyroid, or in the infertility section. So he goes into talking about infertility, miscarriage, and pregnancy loss. Pregnancy complications, polycystic ovary syndrome, PCOS, touches on MTHFR, which you have heard me talk on as well. So he talks about all of these things and how they relate to not only fi— fi— sorry, thyroid, couldn't get that F to stop coming out of my mouth, thyroid function, but also how they interact with the Epstein-Barr virus, how that interacts with your reproductive system and affects overall your infertility system. All right. So these are the kind of things that we talk about, educate. I talk about, I'm an admin for a group, Infertility Empowered, and we talk about these things that you can go to your doctor with, that you can feel empowered to start the conversation, find out what is going on, um, at least get an answer, right? I mean, maybe that's not the thing, but maybe it is. And all these things are contributing factors to infertility. So this week, um, I do 3 o'clock Friday training. So this Friday training— today is Friday at 3 o'clock— I will be live in the group doing a mindset training. And we're not talking about, hey, think positive and get pregnant. That's not it at all. So if you want to drop a message there and ask questions, go ahead. The link is in the comments for the group. I hope to see you there this afternoon at 3 o'clock. Health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.