Sweet choice, sweet dignity
By: Sandra Winterbach
Tags: In Vitro Fertilization, Health, Empowerment, Choices, Pregnancy

It’s been a good half year since I first wrote about my miscarriage in “What the hell type of a sugar am I supposed to add to that?” and it’s time to write the second episode on my journey to the miracle of a new life.

I have to write it today. Because I think I might be pregnant again. And I want to write this second part of the story before I take the test and “officially” know. I want it to be written from this place of uncertainty, that only trust can conquer.

So let’s jump in. Choice and dignity. It’s not easy to find these in fertility centres. At least not in my experience of the last couple of months.

I decided to go there, because I was curious to see if they could help me understand what my body was lacking to really get my cycle properly running. I was convinced that my body was trying its best. My body is part of me, after all. And I always try my best. And it had gotten better! My cycle was still slow, but all the spotting and pains and all of that mess had slowly but steadily decreased month after month. Maybe I just needed a little bit of help for the last 20%? A piece of the puzzle that I was missing and that would really empower my body to get the cycle fully going?

My gynaecologists hadn’t really been too enlightening so far. Yes, it was clear my hormones were not balanced as they should be. But they didn’t really have an explanation as to why and the only thing they could think of was to tell me that at 28, I was still young, and they could set me up with some every-couple-of-hours-hormone-injections to tip the balance and that might do the trick. I had my doubts.

I knew that part of the reason why my body had gone through so many struggles over the past year-and-a-bit in setting the right hormone balance was because I had denied it the chance to really learn how to do this when it was originally supposed to figure this out: in puberty.

When I was 15, I wanted to be cool and pretty. The braces were gone, and the pill finally took the pimples. Score! Plus, it also offered the convenient “side-effect” that it kept me safe from getting pregnant. My grandma had gotten pregnant accidentally, and this pregnancy drastically changed the entire trajectory of her life. I wasn’t interested in following in her footsteps, at least not in that regard. I had never really bothered to understand all the other different ways that these artificial hormones impacted my body. The voices that wanted to warn me of the dangers of the pill really only entered the periphery of my adolescent attention where I felt comfortable to ignore them. Had I listened to them, I might have at least been aware that taking the pill meant my body didn’t have a cycle at all and why that might be important. But I didn’t.

In my early 20ies I figured I was out of puberty now, so I switched from the pill to IUD. The threat of pimples seemed less likely now that I was older (as if pimples (or puberty) are linked to a specific age, not a specific state of my body…) and it was annoying having to remember to take a pill every day. A couple of pimples came back, but they were manageable. I told myself I was taking less hormones and that was good enough.

Back to 28 and my now desire for a baby. How would more artificial hormones help my body figure out this mess I had put it through? I had tried one cycle on Clomifen already since my doctor thought it might help. It was meant to be minimally invasive. And maybe that was just the little jump start my body needed? While this pill had slightly sped up my slow ovulation, it had also caused my uterus to “forget” to grow its mucous membrane and left me not pregnant but with a 4cm double-cyst in one of my ovaries the next cycle instead. This clearly wasn’t the missing puzzle piece and I really didn’t need some more tries to confirm that again.

So. Fertility Centres. They are the experts, right? They must be able to tell me more.

I was happy at the start. A friendly doctor told me he wanted to do proper diagnosis first, monitor the entire cycle, and then we would be able to discuss options once we knew what was going on. Good. I wanted diagnosis and I wanted options. No options, no choice. Right? Except, various ultrasounds and blood-tests later, the only option he felt he could recommend to us was in-vitro fertilization.

This is where I would have gone off in anger, frustration and despair a couple of months ago, crying about this cruel fate I was a victim to. Instead, I sat in the black chair 1.5m opposite this doctor with the medical degree (and no hair cut) and simply said: “I disagree.”

“I disagree.” Such a simple sentence. Yet, my ultimate moment of empowerment.

How did I get there?

While the fertility centre had been busy analysing all our tests and having a not-so-friendly-doctor check on my fallopian tubes like I was some sort of broken car (except, I am sure a lot of mechanics actually treat the cars they work on much more tenderly than this man whose job it was to check the most intimate and delicate parts of my female body and who didn’t even think it necessary to say hello and face me when I entered the room) — I had found the missing piece of the puzzle elsewhere.

The answer to my riddle came not through conventional medicine and its drugs and expensive procedures, and it didn’t come from natural medicine and its herbs and treatments either. It came through the deepest level of trust into my body and three brilliant and generous women who share their experiences, research, and conclusions on their free podcasts to help me dive deeper into that trust.

Now, it all seems so obvious I almost can’t understand why it took me so long to figure this out.

My body is an ultimately intelligent creation of this world. It is built on a multitude of intricately inter-woven systems who all coordinate and cooperate to form my life. It’s a miracle that no human has fully been able to decode in all its details. But the basic principles are not so complex.

My body runs an endless to-do-list every day. Breaths to take, food to digest, information to distribute, mess to clean up, infections to ward off. All these essentials that I never even think about and just take for granted. Then there are all these other items I consciously put on the agenda. Like deciding to take a walk, talking to another person, thinking, working, … My body needs energy to fuel all these activities. (Amongst others, especially energy in the form of glucose, a type of sugar, of all things! THAT’s the real sugar I am supposed to add to that :D) And if I don’t supply enough energy — it must prioritize. It can only spend its budget once. And when all is spent, it builds a deficit.

I have put waaaay too many things on my body’s to-do-list over the last couple of years. I know because I am still constantly exhausted. A very obvious and very major energy deficit. Accumulated while trying to fulfill all the super high expectations I had placed on myself.

So, let’s see: What would you do, if you were my body? You are deep in the red and have this endless list of things you need to take care of (some of which you absolutely MUST do, or we both simply die). A couple of them make no sense to you (like, you can see it’s been dark outside for hours, but I insist we won’t sleep yet. Or you tell me you need food, but I tell you it’s not time to eat right now…). You know it’s stupid, but you shuffle some things around and figure out a way. That’s what all your back up systems were built for, after all! You go through Plan B and Plan C. You also send me little messages. Like the hair that falls out, because you don’t have any resources left to take care of that anymore and you know it’s really not that critical for our survival. Or increasingly frequent headaches. Et cetera. But I ignore your messages. Which means, you have no choice but to keep hustling. Plan C becomes Plan D. And the red keeps growing.

And then, out of nowhere, I come to you and say: Hey, I have decided we’ll grow another human being inside of us. You can figure out how to do this, right? Oh, and I’d like to have it next month, please.

You would tell me to fuck off. Or at least I hope you would, for your own sake. Except, that’s not really what we do these days, is it? That’s the problem.

My body didn’t, either. It tried really hard to make everything work. But it can’t bypass the laws of nature. Nobody can. It had to fail.

Quitting my job was the first step to listening to my body’s messages again. I realised I actually need to re-learn it’s language. I also need to re-learn how to properly respond to these messages. I think us humans are meant to have an intuition for that. I have lost big chunks of that intuition, for sure.

But I also think I can rebuild this skill. And I also know how to start — and where to get support.

That’s how I know that the last thing my body needs is to pump it full of more artificial hormones to force it into an in-vitro pregnancy when it’s not ready. Listening to more and more of these podcasts after my last ovulation, I decided to start a break on the entire topic (including the naturally conceived pregnancies) from now on and do my homework first. To get out of that deficit and build up some savings.

I started changing my nutrition and figured out how to fix my sleep over the last few weeks. It only took two weeks of a strict bedtime routine before I started to fall asleep quickly again and slept through till the morning! I hadn’t really done that in years now, at least not consistently. And it was incredibly cool to see how that improved my cycle immediately. I could tell because, even though its duration remained basically the same, my cervical mucus got to that see-through consistency the NFP (Natural Family Planning) information always talks about that I had never seen on me before.

And now, my period is late. It was already late last cycle, but the embryo didn’t make it past the all-or-nothing-gate. I actually felt it being expelled out of my uterine wall a day before my period would have usually started. The bleeding then came four days later, after my body had had enough time to break down the early-stage pregnancy hormones again — and confirmed my suspicion.

I never asked a doctor to validate this. I can trust my own observations now. Plus, the doctors can’t really tell you much that early in a pregnancy anyways. Their tests are hardly sensitive enough to make out the first few days of hormone changes in a pregnancy and the embryo is much too small at that stage to see anything on the ultrasound. All we have at this stage is our own awareness and intuition.

The knowledge I built over the last few months is what restored my dignity in this whole process. My heart broke every time I walked into the fertility clinic and saw all these women with their men by their sides in the waiting area. In covid-times, my husband was only allowed in for the first meeting. Everything else I had to do on my own. The only reason I have seen the staff allow the husbands to be present after that first meeting was when the wife didn’t speak (enough) German to have any idea what the doctor was saying to her. How many men even know how to translate all this? How infinitely more powerless these women must feel, when I already felt so helpless for most of that experience myself! And I still live in my country of birth.

I have my dignity back now, because I found a way to empower myself to sit in front of my doctor with the medical degree and have an opinion of my own. To say it out loud in front of him. Stand up for myself and reject that “broken” label I felt they were trying to stick on me. It allowed me to understand that what he was saying was not a verdict over my life, but simply the only product he has in his catalogue to offer anyone. His clinic doesn’t work on improving sleep. And it doesn’t work on nutrition or nerval systems or anything else part of an integrated and holistic approach that might be able to decipher what is robbing my body of its energy. That’s just not what this system is set up to do.

I also found the perfect choice for me. If I am pregnant now, I will do my very best to offer my body and this little baby everything they might need to actually make it through the full pregnancy and into this world as a healthy, new, miraculous life. If it turns out I am not pregnant after all or we don’t end up making it through the full pregnancy, I know it will also be okay. I know my path now.

Whether you are a woman or a man or anything in between and no matter in which area you struggle: I want you to know that I believe none of us are broken. All of us have a choice, and all of us have a path. And maybe, one day, we will have a system that strives to support us to find this path and our own healing.

It’s in our power to build that system. And I hope sharing my story can be a tiny contribution to that cause.