Erica Hoke walks through three steps if you suspect infertility: schedule appointments with both an OB-GYN and fertility specialist at once, get baseline testing including hormone panels and a semen analysis for your partner (about one-third of infertility cases are male factor), and track your cycle while creating a reproductive life plan with timelines for treatment options.
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Hey, welcome. Today we're talking about the first 3 steps to take if you think that you have infertility or if you've been told by a doctor that you have infertility. Now, if you've been told by the doctor that you have infertility and they haven't done testing on you, you need to decide if you want to go back to that doctor or if you want to find a new practitioner, because what are they basing that diagnosis on? So you want to, um, if you have insurance, you want to make sure that you utilize as much of your insurance as possible. So here are the things that I would suggest that you do with your OB-GYN, um, before and during making an appointment also with a fertility specialist. So you get your diagnosis or you suspect that you have infertility. First thing that you do, make an appointment with your OB-GYN. Also make an appointment with a fertility doctor. The reason that you want to do that is because you do not want to delay the process. And sometimes fertility doctors are scheduling 4 to 6 or more weeks out. So while you're getting that blood test done, those blood tests and consulting with your OB-GYN, you want to have the next step already queued up, right? So when you go back to your OB-GYN or your new one, Here are some tests to ask them for. You want to do basic blood work. This is something that you can also do through a general practitioner here in the States. That will be— it's called a CBC. So you want to ask for that. That's the same as a physical. The other thing that you want to do is that you want to make sure that you get your hormone levels checked. I can't tell you how many clients come to me and they just haven't even had a basic blood panel done. Um, so you're going to test your estrogen, your testosterone, your thyroid, your progesterone, all of those things to see where your levels are at. Um, it's also great at that point if you have previous levels to go ahead and compare those because your doctor will not necessarily do that. They will just tell you, okay, you're in range. Well, is it in range for me? Because that's really important. Personalized care is optimizing your health, right? And so you're going to do blood work, you're going to make those appointments. You're going to also talk to your OB-GYN about scheduling anatomy scans. You want to make sure that your tubes are not blocked. You want to make sure that you don't have any irregularities in your uterus. Okay. And the third thing under this point is you want to make sure that you get your husband scanned and you get him scanned right away because, and when I say scanned semen analysis and that sort of thing, so many times the woman is the focus of infertility and then turns out it was her partner or spouse all along. Right. A third of all infertility cases are male factor infertility. So up front, you want to get your partner tested. Okay, if you think that you have infertility and, um, oops, oops, if you think that you have infertility and you, um, are not tracking your ovulation and you're not tracking your cycles, that's a great place to start. Not just cycle length, not just ovulation, but symptoms. Are you getting pain on the right or the left during ovulation? Are you having bloating symptoms? Are you having Mid-cycle breakthrough bleeding. All of these things are important to getting you good diagnosis and clues to your overall fertility health. Okay, so the last thing that we're going to talk about today is we're going to talk about creating a reproductive life plan. So if you are facing infertility and you haven't sat down with your spouse and talked about this, it's super important. Um, it is a timeline of how long you want to pursue, um, say, natural fertility measures, when you're going to make that step up to more aggressive measures in terms of reproductive medicine. Um, if it is ever a possibility that you will adopt, is adoption in your future, it's good to know as you're going through this process, um, if that is the case. So I'm going to put a link to that in the comments. If you are interested in getting a template for that reproductive life plan, then go ahead and, uh, click that link. I will see you next time. Health and blessings to you guys.
