I can’t be the only one who, as a teenager, thought “cycles” were nothing more than a monthly annoyance called a period, right? At 16, I certainly thought that’s all there was to it. So when I was training for another season of cross-country and hadn’t had a period in a year, I thought I had just saved myself the trouble of a year’s worth of headache. I knew that many lean distance runners didn’t have periods, so I figured it wasn’t problematic—for the time being, anyway. My physician felt differently, and I was started on an oral contraceptive to mimic normal hormone levels. One pill per day didn’t seem like a big deal (especially since cutting back on my training was not an option I was willing to explore at the time), so I took them to mask the low-body-weight/ training-induced irregularity… for seven years.
By my mid-20s, I had a stable job, a husband, a nice house, and a (very cute) dog. Our fairy tale was just missing a little one. The time had come to discontinue the oral contraceptive. Just a few months later, I was at an annual appointment with my Ob/Gyn, which led to an appointment with a reproductive endocrinologist. I had started some basic charting—enough to know that something wasn’t right. I knew I was not ovulating regularly (if at all). Frequently, couples are given one year of “trying to conceive” before anything is viewed as “abnormal,” but I knew there wasn’t anything “normal” about not ovulating.
While being seen by the reproductive endocrinologist, I underwent the usual litany of tests followed by several rounds of oral ovulation induction. It felt like 100 treatment cycles, but it was probably only 3 or 4 before I received a phone call from the physician personally, saying, “We can get you pregnant, it just may not be the way you wanted.”
My heart sank. “What do you mean, not the way I wanted?”
After the conversation, I was devastated and emotionally exhausted, thinking “Maybe you can get me to ovulate with enough medication, but what actually is the problem?” Even though “unexplained infertility” was the diagnosis in my medical chart, I was determined to find the underlying issue so that I could have my own healthy cycles with my own chance of conception (especially because I was only 25 years old and in otherwise decent health.)
We took a break from trying to conceive under the reproductive endocrinologist, and I started applying my functional medicine thought processes to myself. I read studies and small trials to select some evidence-based supplements to address underlying metabolic dysfunction. I also eliminated foods that are often inflammatory, cut back on running, optimized my thyroid medication dose, sought out an acupuncturist and took her recommended herbs, and most importantly, I observed my body and charted every detail.
After months of resetting my body and looking at every possible underlying issue, I ovulated on my own and we soon found out I was pregnant.
When you are experiencing infertility, it seems like everyone around you gets pregnant quickly and easily. You wonder, “how will our story end? How will I recount this chapter of my life?” It feels like sprinting with no finish line in sight. Everyday requires effort to be hopeful and appear unbothered when really you are wondering how many more days, weeks, months, years you might carry this invisible heaviness inside.
I am so grateful for my kiddos, but I still feel a deep pang of sorrow in my chest when I think about those seasons of waiting for our turn to post a pregnancy announcement on social media. Looking back, I now feel fortunate that my professional work unexpectedly collided with a personal passion as close to me as fertility. Having felt the weight of infertility allows me to relate to couples in a way I never could have before. It is never lost on me how truly miraculous each story is.