Well-Being: My Fertility Journey
The preconception period up until the day I found out I was pregnant!
I’m almost to our due date and feeling all the feels getting ready to welcome our first baby into the world! I plan to write about pregnancy and birth in more detail at a later time, but I’m way overdue in sharing this post all about my fertility journey.
I guess my preconception journey sort of started with freezing my eggs a couple years ago. If you’ve been following along for a while, you may have read about that adventure (disaster?), which ended up being one of the most challenging periods of my life thus far. It was never my intention to go the IVF route, but I felt the pressure of age creeping up on me and wanted to have a plan B (even though there’s never any guarantee with egg freezing) in case I ever struggled to conceive in the future. My partner and I had started talking about starting a family, but at the time I froze my eggs, we weren’t ready and were just over 2 years into our relationship. The physical toll egg freezing took on my body was tremendous and at the time I wondered if I’d made a huge mistake in doing it, but I did get a good number of eggs retrieved and it’s nice to know they are there if I ever need them.
The recovery from egg freezing, emergency gallbladder removal and multiple parasites was long and grueling. It took me a while to feel like myself again, but the whole experience really motivated me to reinvest in my health and clean things up a bit after a couple messy years when I was first living in Mexico. I started working with my naturopath, Elizabeth Wade based in Portland, after my gallbladder surgery with the intention of optimizing my fertility in hopes to conceive without assistance in the next couple of years. We worked a lot on reducing inflammation, getting my gut in check and cleaning up my lifestyle to support my endocrine system. Some of what I’m sharing at the end of this post Elizabeth helped me with (mostly the supplements and some of the lifestyle stuff).