Erica Hoke, an infertility coach, shares how doctors told her IVF wasn't an option after diagnoses including stage 4 endometriosis, dozens of fibroids, and low ovarian reserve. That rejection pushed her toward natural approaches like acupuncture and supplements, which led to four healthy sons and shaped her coaching work.
Chapters
Morning everyone, happy Monday! Feels like a lot of Mondays in a row these days, right? I'm here to talk to you about a little bit about my infertility journey today and the turning point in it that kind of changed everything for me. If you don't know me, I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and empowerment coach, and I— if you don't know anything about my story, let me just give you a teeny tiny background. So I had been diagnosed with unexplained infertility, but that unexplained infertility diagnosis also came along with a lot of reproductive, um, a lot of reproductive issues diagnosis. So I still got the title of unexplained infertility despite having the fact, uh, despite having, um, stage 4 endometriosis, uterine fibroids, low AMH and ovarian reserve, PCOS, um, Factor V Leiden, and thyroid disease. So despite having all those diagnosable reproductive issues, I still got the diagnosis of unexplained infertility. Go figure. So we, we knew, my husband and I knew going into trying to have a baby that we were probably up against some issues. But in the back of my mind, in the back of his mind, we were going to pursue it to whatever degree we had to, and that meant reproductive medicine. So we wanted to— sorry. Oh goodness. Okay. We wanted to we wanted to do whatever it took. And so we had done consultations with reproductive endocrinology, endocrinologist. I had had surgery, so I had surgery for an excision for my stage 4 endometriosis, which was very aggressive. That was, I think that was the first surgery that I had. I had some basically what turned out to be exploratory surgery for uterine fibroids. Um, that was— nothing was really found. Um, the second one, they were able to find 1 or 2 or 3, like just a handful of small fibroids and excise those. But my symptoms persisted. So I was having terrible, terrible painful periods, very heavy bleeding, lots of clots. Sorry, TMI, but you got— you girls know that are watching what that's like. So I had all these terrible symptoms. So finally, the next part of the surgery, the next step in the surgery process was a saline-infused surgery where they fill your uterus with saline so that the fibroids don't retract back into the muscle of the uterine wall. And it turns out because, um, because there was the fluid in there and they were able to not be pushed back into the wall by, you know, just the pressure of poking around in there. They were able to find a handful, it's probably somewhere between 20 and 30 small fibroids that they removed. It looked like a handful of aquarium gravel. And so that was out of the way. And we went forward. We were still, we were still trying to get pregnant on our own. And we went to the reproductive endocrinologist and we were told that IVF was absolutely out of the question for us, that we could try IUI, but IVF was not possible because they couldn't do an egg retrieval on me because my ovaries were already hyperstimulated. So they couldn't stimulate me to do an egg retrieval. And I had very few eggs left. At 35, 34, 35, before we got pregnant for the first time, I was diagnosed with a low ovarian reserve and low AMH. So the turning point for me was being told no. And if you've ever talked to, if you ever talked to my mom one time in my life, you would tell her that even from a young, age, I did not like the word no. So I set out on trying to find ways to help myself increase my fertility naturally, what affects fertility, and that's, that's what I'm putting together for you guys in my course, my Infertility Success Blueprint course. So I started implementing those things. They included diet and lifestyle changes, they included supplements, that included acupuncture for fertility. And so, but that was the turning point, is once I knew that there was no one able to help me but me, I had to do it. I had to figure it out on my own. I had to work through some emotional stuff too. Emotional baggage can affect your fertility. It's been, you know, clearly documented as well. So once I had that definitive no that Western medicine, that reproductive medicine was not going to be able to help me, then we moved forward with a plan of our own that ended up being very successful in, in our goals, at least. So I have 4 healthy boys, in case you don't know. So I'm going to see you here Wednesday. I'm going to give you part 2. And the second part is, even though I got pregnant, I still was not at my healthiest. And we're going to talk about that. So If you're watching on YouTube, go ahead and hit that like and subscribe, um, especially if you want notified for part 2 on Wednesday noon Eastern Standard Time. I'm here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.
