This content was created by Erica Hoke. This content was uploaded by Erica Hoke. This is a YouTube live video titled "The Turning Point in My Infertility Journey- part 2" (created 2021-12-16) featuring Erica Hoke, an infertility mentor and empowerment coach. It is a solo livestream in which Erica continues her personal infertility story: prior surgeries removing stage 4 endometriosis and multiple fibroids, being told she was not a candidate for IVF due to low/stimulatable egg reserve, choosing not to pursue IUI/IVF, and instead using acupuncture, diet and lifestyle changes to reduce systemic inflammation — steps she credits with helping her conceive. The content includes practical tips on reducing inflammation (whole/organic foods, less processed food, prioritizing organic animal products, reducing toxins), encouragement for viewers, and calls to like/subscribe and tune in to her regular live schedule.
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Hey, how is everyone doing today? Just making sure my audio is working. Let me just double check something here. Okay, I think we're good to go. Sorry about that. I am doing part 2 today of the turning point in my infertility journey, part 2. If you didn't catch part 1, it was on Monday, um, because I'm here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday live at noon Eastern Standard Time. And who am I? If you haven't seen me, I'm Erica Hoke. I'm an infertility mentor and empowerment coach. And this is part 2 of my story. So part 1 centered around a lot of my medical conditions, uh, a lot of my surgeries, uh, that I had done to, um, excise stage 4 endometriosis, to remove uterine fibroids, lots of them, get to a point because, uh, of being able to do that because I had had 2 unsuccessful fibroid removal surgeries before I got to the saline-infused surgery that they were able to actually see how many fibroids I actually had. So if you missed that on Monday, go back and catch up on that and then watch this one. But this is the second part. So I've had my fibroid— I've had my endometriosis removed, I've had my fibroids removed, now we— I'm functioning, I'm a little bit healthier, I'm feeling better physically. And then the reproductive endocrinologist kind of drops the bomb on us that boom, you are not a candidate for IVF. I was already hyperovulating. They couldn't stimulate me to get any eggs. And by the way, I had very few eggs left at age 35 before I even got pregnant with my first child. 34, 35, I was told that I would need donor eggs before I had one of my 4 children, 3 of them. Let that sink in for a minute. 7 years after I was told I was, I would need donor eggs, I had my last child. So that's why I'm here to help you. I'm here to help you with my, my story, but I'm also here to help you, um, be empowered on your part of the story because everybody's is a little bit different, right? But that doesn't mean that what I'm telling you is not going to be useful for your journey. Okay. So part 2, part 2 is I had all these surgeries. The IVF, the reproductive endocrinologist tells us you can't do IVF. We did not want to do IVF. I, IUI, we chose not to do IUI just because the success rates were really low and we just didn't feel in our hearts that that was the issue that was going— that was the procedure that was going to solve our problems. And so we chose to— I chose to do a lot of research about what affects your fertility and how you can help your fertility. I went down a lot of different rabbit holes and one of the things that I found, um, one of the stories is with acupuncture. So acupuncture for fertility is very successful, not only in conjunction with reproductive medicine, but on its own, um, regular cycles. But I had friends that didn't, that used it to regulate their cycles and then get pregnant. And for me, it helped to regulate my body systemically and holistically on, um, a Chinese medicine doctor would tell you your kidney and your liver channels. So I was doing that, and I did do diet and lifestyle changes. Now, if you would have asked me at the time, I would have told you that I had a pretty good diet. I ate salads, I tried to eat vegetables every day, um, but my body was still with a lot of inflammation. And that's basically the, the pinnacle of today's conversation is the inflammation that was in my body. So I switched to non— a lot of non-processed foods, eating whole foods, as much organic as I could, although I was prioritizing meat and protein like milk, egg, and cheese as organic because of the hormones that are associated with the non-organic, uh, protein products, right? So I prioritized for meat products including dairy and dairy and cheese, and that helped my body with the inflammation. And then I was just steadily trying to do things like that, eat more vegetables, eat less processed. The reason that I'm telling you is because I feel like people think that you need to have a huge shift, dramatic shift, and what you're doing, and it doesn't always have to be that way. Every step towards reducing the inflammation in your body and reducing your toxic load, uh, through eating organics and not putting chemicals and things like that on your skin is one step closer to better health. It might just get you to the point that you need to be for your infertility journey. So when I got pregnant, we were actually at we were on a couple's trip. So it was a trip for my husband's birthday and our anniversary, and we were at Disney. We're actually at Animal Kingdom, and we took some pictures there. And I was pregnant at the time, but I was early pregnant. I was in that 2-week wait that we are all so familiar with, and I didn't know. I started to have inklings that that might be the case, but if you've never been pregnant before, you're still not 100% sure until you go through that first pregnancy. What it's actually gonna be like for your body. So it's interesting to me because my husband and I were both significantly weight, significantly less in those pictures. But if I was going to show them to you, we both looked far, far than we do now. Even though we weigh more, we have so much less inflammation in our body. But the key to that too is, as a viewer, I was still able to conceive with the changes that I made with the acupuncture, the changes in the diet, and still get pregnant by reducing the inflammation in my body, even though I had a ton of inflammation. Okay. So I bring that as a piece of hope for you. Now, I continued on my health journey and I learned how to reduce inflammation in my body even more and get even healthier. And understand what my body needed and supplement the nutrition deficits that I was experiencing and things like that. But I still, without perfection, was able to conceive. So that is part 2 of my infertility journey. Uh, if you're watching on YouTube and you like the content and you want to see more like this, I'm here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at noon Eastern Standard Time hit that like and subscribe. If you're watching on Facebook and you want to get notified, go ahead and hit that like and subscribe on YouTube so you get notified, because Facebook does not like to notify you when I go live. All right, health and blessings to you guys. Bye-bye.
