Like most of my patients, Avery avidly read books and online information about enhancing chances of conception. Collecting information from so many, sometimes conflicting sources, leads many women to gather unhelpful advice that can even interfere with conception.
Holding your urine may seem like a good idea, but you run the risk of a urinary tract infection (UTI), especially if you are prone to them, as Avery was. Also, by “holding it in,” there is a natural tendency for the pelvic floor to tighten and constrict, which can be counterproductive to conception.
Moreover, it’s a myth that the sperm readily “leaks out.” Sperm are dynamic; it’s unavoidable that some get left behind, but the dynamic sperm quickly separate from the seminal fluid as they swim up to the fallopian tubes. Once there, they may sit for several days waiting to fertilize a matured egg as it descends from one of the ovaries.
The fertility clinic experience
After twelve months of trying on their own without success, Avery’s family doctor referred her to an RE at a fertility clinic in Toronto. Avery described the process as impersonal and stressful. At their first consultation, she and her husband gave blood samples and spoke briefly with the doctor before being ushered to separate rooms for preliminary tests.
Avery was shown to one room for a trans-vaginal ultrasound. The technician watched a monitor attached to the probe while moving it inside Avery’s vagina, looking inside her left and right ovaries for the developing antral follicles as well as examining the thickness of the uterine lining. This invasive process, which every fertility patient undergoes, can be very uncomfortable, but is necessary to determine the state of your fertility in that moment and therefore the likelihood of IVF success.
At the same time, Avery’s husband, Walter, was led to a small room just big enough for an armchair, a TV with a DVD player, and a small collection of X-rated movies and magazines. He was handed a plastic specimen cup and told to produce a sample. Fifteen minutes later, he handed his sperm sample to the nurse to be tested.
Avery and Walter then met briefly with the doctor, who described their next steps, and talked about statistics and probabilities. Typically, the fertility doctor shares Western medicine’s facts and perspectives about fertility, often without having seen their test results. For a woman who is already feeling emotional, vulnerable, and stressed, the process can feel dehumanizing.
In a nutshell, the doctor told Avery and her husband that, reproductively speaking, at thirty-eight, she was old. They should start right away with cycle monitoring, where the clinic would track her ovulation and they would be directed to have intercourse at the optimal times. Their chances would be moderately better if they came to the clinic for IUI. If that didn’t work for them after three tries, they could try IVF. But they should decide quickly because Avery’s eggs were “getting older by the day.” So she returned to the fertility clinic on the third day of her menstrual cycle and for many mornings thereafter for early morning cycle monitoring (CM).
Leading a busy life as a partner in a law firm and not wanting to be late for work, Avery would go to the fertility clinic before dawn each morning in an effort to put her name down first on the sign-up sheets at the reception counter. One list was to check the hormone levels in her blood, the second was to look at her developing follicles through trans-vaginal ultrasound, and the third was to meet with the doctor.
Somehow she never managed to be first. By 7 a.m. daily, the waiting room would be full of women seated quietly with their heads in a book or their cell phones, avoiding contact with each other. Avery preferred the anonymity, and dreaded the thought of running into someone she might know. A private person, she worried about admitting to someone she was having trouble conceiving.
Mentally prepare to go to a fertility clinic
If you are reading this book before your first visit to a fertility clinic, the information in the next section will help you prepare for it. If you have already been to a fertility clinic, and it was as difficult for you as it is for most women, this information might help you put your experiences into a different perspective.
Even if you don’t plan to go that route, you have no way of knowing whether your own pathway to pregnancy will end up taking you there. As a mother who didn’t plan to use a fertility clinic but ended up doing so, I can promise that you don’t always know where your fertility journey will take you. Although this section will equip you with information I give patients who come to me before attending a fertility appointment, it’s information you may find useful no matter where you are on your pathway.
An opportunity to gather information
I counsel my patients to view the fertility clinic as a step on their path, and I suggest you see it as an opportunity to gather medical information about your current baseline reproductive health. Along the way, remember you are always in charge. When it comes time to make decisions, pay attention to your intuition. Attending an appointment at a fertility clinic does not bind you to undergoing any kind of interventions.
Create a positive state of mind before attending your first appointment. Fertility doctors typically compare your test results against what they believe to be the “norm.” But you are a dynamic individual, capable of change, and your body has an innate way of healing itself. Use the tips and techniques you’ll learn in this book to take an active role in your reproductive health.
Please do not consider the fertility doctor’s diagnosis to be the final word. Their evaluation is an educated guess, an opinion based on statistical averages and numbers. Each woman is unique. Many babies are born despite unfavourable diagnoses from fertility specialists.
The clinic doctors may speak in generalizations. If you are over thirty-five, your fertility doctor may say you are reproductively old. If your tests indicate your eggs look less than stellar, remember that this test represents a moment in time. Eggs are cells that develop over the course of a year. From a TCM perspective, you can have a profound impact on your eggs’ health in their last ninety to 120 days, while they are growing and proliferating, by making positive changes in your life. Fertility doctors are not versed in TCM principles and do not view egg health as flexible, but as we’ll see in Chapter 5, egg health can change dramatically in a short period of time.
If you have already been to a fertility clinic
If you have already been to a fertility clinic and found it difficult, try to reframe your visit with these thoughts in mind: It was an opportunity to collect baseline information about your reproductive health. Your doctor’s opinion is just that—an opinion. You are not bound to follow any advice that makes you uncomfortable and you need to listen to your intuition in making decisions. Your visit may have left you feeling out of control, but you can take back control any time you choose. Your first step may be to try TCM as a way of getting a second opinion from a different perspective.
Epigenetics and environment
Before learning TCM, I studied sciences and was always looking for ways to demystify this ancient Chinese art. Even after I entered practice and was helping countless patients achieve their goals of better health and healthy babies, I continued to seek modern explanations for the centuries-old success of Chinese medicine.
Reading about quantum physics, which recognizes the energy fields or “Qi” that we study in Chinese medicine, excited me, but when I heard Dr. Bruce Lipton, a renowned cellular biologist, speak at an acupuncturists’ conference in 2004, his words and research resonated with me in a profound way. Dr. Lipton discussed the new science of epigenetics, a complex cellular science that says environment affects the health and well-being of our cells even more profoundly than genetics. Even our conscious and subconscious thoughts, beliefs, and emotions are part of our environment.
For me, Dr. Lipton’s work was the missing link, helping me understand why in TCM we focus on harmony