The Fertility Journey is Harder Than I Thought

We explore how we are not alone when we find ourselves with a fertility threatening diagnosis. We discuss how an infertility diagnosis can affect our feelings, our relationships, and our perspective of life in general. 

At Love and Science, we empower, we educate through evidence, and we use mindful self compassion to start to heal from the inside out. 

We discuss a few clients and patients who have benefitted from using coaching tools to re-discover their values and identity, to persevere in the face of adversity, and to help re-attune their mindset to a perspective which serves them.

As always, please keep in mind that this is my perspective and nothing in this podcast is medical advice.

If you found this conversation valuable, book a consult call with me:

https://calendly.com/loveandsciencefertility/discovery-call

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Please don’t let infertility have the final word. We are here to take the burden from you so that you can achieve your goal of building your family with confidence and compassion. I’m rooting for you always.

Transcript:

Hi friends, I'm Erica Bove MD and welcome to the Love and Science podcast.

You're listening to episode one.

I'm your host and also the founder of Love and Science, thriving through infertility.

I'm so excited you're here today.

With over a decade of experience, helping thousands of women just like you, I empower professional women to build their families.

Let's dive in.

I'm so, so excited to be here today.

This is the very first episode of the Love and Science podcast.

And I dedicated this podcast, this version to all of the people who are trying to get pregnant right now.

And that may be you that very likely is you.

And I want to call this the fertility journey is harder than I thought.

I think so many of us work so hard to achieve what we want in life.

And we think for various reasons that we're going to try to build a family and it's going to happen fairly quickly.

And if even if it doesn't, you know, we just work hard enough and we're able to achieve that reality.

However, I've just seen time and time again, that it just doesn't work that way for everybody.

We know that one in six couples faces a diagnosis of infertility and one in four female physicians also faces a diagnosis of infertility.

So it's so very common.

And I think we need to bring that up because it's so darn isolating.

But I what I really wanted to share with you today is what to do when we find ourselves with a fertility threatening diagnosis, it can affect our feelings, it can affect our relationships, it can affect our professional lives, and it can just make life so small.

And I also wanted to share what we do at Love and Science.

We have three main pillars, and that is to empower, to educate through evidence, and to bring mindful self compassion to this journey.

I am incredibly passionate about the fact that people who want to become parents will become parents.

We just got to figure out what that pathway is going to look like.

And I am committed tirelessly to my patients and my clients to make that dream a reality.

So let's talk about it.

First, I want to talk about a few of my clients.

The first one is a 40 year old physician.

She has a diagnosis of diminished ovarian reserve and male factor.

She's done three IVF cycles over three clinics, and she's had a miscarriage.

She's juggling a busy practice.

And she's unsure if she wants to continue at this time.

And so obviously, we delved a lot into her values, her identity, her feelings, her reserves.

Sometimes it's just as important to know when to pause as it is when to continue.

And so through a lot of mindset work, she is staying with the treatments for now considering options.

And I think really learning a lot about herself and what she values and her own internal strength in the process.

I have another former patient who I bring up today, because she actually had five miscarriages, including a euploid, many euploid embryos, actually, she decided to adopt, she had a beautiful son.

And then we went back to the drawing board to think about non IVF strategies.

And lo and behold, she conceived beautiful twins.

And then she had another child after that.

And so I think sometimes it's about looking at the big picture, taking a step back to her credit, she made some major life changes that reduced a lot of the stress in her world.

And now I look forward to their holiday card every single year.

And we keep in touch.

And I just think of how we work together, we looked at all the possibilities, we did mindset work, I believed in her and them, I did not give up on them.

And now she has a beautiful family.

I also like to bring up with this particular person, that she was open to considering many different ways of building a family.

And I think through a lot of openness and through a lot of discernment, she has four beautiful children who she is is meant to have.

And in many ways, I think it's because she was open to different possibilities.

And so I think about her and her husband and their courage and their strength, and it always inspires me.

I have another client who is a general surgery resident.

She decided to freeze her eggs, she did not have a partner, she knows that building a family is important to her at some point in time.

And she's getting older, she's in her mid 30s.

And so when she first came to me, it wasn't just about freezing her eggs.

It was also about how to navigate asking for time off of work, being a busy resident, and all of that.

So she got started.

And you know, I think the expectation sometimes with an egg freezing cycle, especially in the face of normal numbers is that it's going to go very well.

And unfortunately, she did not have the best first cycle.

But then we met, we regrouped, we did some mindset work.

And then she decided to do a second cycle, which was much, much better.

And now she's confidently moving forward with her career, understanding that she has the number of eggs frozen that she desires.

And also understanding that she didn't throw in the towel after the first cycle, just because from a mindset perspective, it was so very difficult.

I also have this other wonderful client who froze her eggs at the age of 34, another doctor, she was a resident at the time.

And then she came back to use those frozen eggs two years later as a single parent, which is amazing.

And at that appointment, we talked about the medicine of thawing the eggs, fertilizing them with donor sperm, and all of those different logistics.

But even more so what we talked about was helping her create her village to navigate her new life as a new parent, a new parent to be, and how to bolster herself while she underwent the process and being proactive rather than reactive.

And I think that's just such a beautiful story because at Love and Science, one thing we really focus on is finding our tribe.

And that's what we did together.

And then finally, I'll mention one last patient who had one child without assistance, and then had four losses.

And she had many unsuccessful cycles.

She finally delivered her rainbow baby.

And I am just so inspired by her willingness to stick through it and to keep her dream top of mind, because she had a lot of setbacks.

And anybody who's undergone this knows that this is not for the faint of heart.

But she was able to see the authentic hope, the reasons to keep going.

And now her family is complete.

And so a lot of what we do at Love and Science, like I said, we empower, we educate through evidence, and we use mindful self compassion to help to understand ourselves better, to help to uncover and connect with our inner wisdom, and then to discern what the next right thing is.

So I'm very, very grateful to be able to offer this now.

We do one on one coaching sessions at Love and Science and also a support group on Friday nights for those who desire that.

And there's just so much healing that that takes place in those meetings.

Yeah.

So if you are listening to this podcast, and you have found yourself with the unfortunate diagnosis of infertility, I want you to know that you're not alone.

There are so many resources to help you.

It can feel so incredibly isolating.

It can feel like an emotional roller coaster.

It can feel absolutely devastating and demoralizing.

And it can take away our power can take away our agency.

I think when these things happen, we need to take a deep breath.

We need to look at what we have to work with.

And we need to start there.

And one thing I always start with when I'm working with a client or a patient because I wear two hats right as a doctor and a fertility coach is what are the reasons for authentic hope?

Like what objective data is there to make us think that there's a chance that this could work.

And the more you get to know me, you'll understand that I am not Pollyanna.

I am not a toxic positivity person at all.

I do think sometimes that especially when we feel threatened and infertility is a threat.

It's a threat of the possibility of either not having a child or not being able to build our families in the way that we want.

And so I think when we feel threatened, our brains shut down in a sense.

Our fear centers take over.

Our anxiety centers take over.

And in many ways, we are incapacitated and even unable to see reasons that this process might yield us that child that we desire so very much.

And so that is part of my role is to shine a light on those things and to help shift the attention to what is actually working, what is actually good.

We absolutely sit with the feelings.

We absolutely sit with the uncertainty and the despair and the fear and the anxiety.

We welcome those feelings because the only way to, to, to really, I don't want to say deal with them, but the only way to have a full human experience and to be able to be exposed to bad news or exposed to uncertainty is to be able to tolerate and even befriend the full range of the human experience.

And so that resilience, that emotional regulation is something that we do a lot at Love and Science.

I will, I will joke to my friends and my colleagues that I would rather clean a toilet than feel my feelings.

But fortunately, through my work with Kavitha Sun, who's a relationship coach and my own strivings and, and own inner work, I have been able to sit with my feelings in a way that I now understand that no feeling will kill me, even if sometimes it feels that way.

And it just gives me a lot more flexibility in the range of feelings I can experience without shutting down.

And it also helps me connect with other people vulnerably and it has given me much deeper relationships.

So that is a ninja skill.

I want to impart to you, my listener, so that you can feel your feelings, whatever they may be, and especially without judgment.

And I really want to help you up level your relationships and whether that's a partner that you have, you know, maybe you're on different pages on the fertility journey and what the next right thing is, maybe you're at an impasse and you feel that that person just doesn't understand you and your situation.

And I will say, you know, most of my listeners are women.

I think we as women do bear the brunt of the fertility process in terms of poking and prodding and testing and sometimes even needles and appointments.

And so one thing I like to do is I like to help people come together, see things from the other perspective and find ways to find their authentic voice so that we can understand each other a lot better.

I also welcome couples when we have one to one on one sessions as well, because I think sometimes that can be a very, very powerful space for healing.

So relationship work is obviously very, very near and dear to my heart.

Also one thing that I'm passionate about is not letting infertility have the final word and also not letting it take the entire field of view.

One thing my patients and my clients say very frequently is that life has become so small.

This is all I can focus on.

I wake up at four o'clock in the morning, just terrified.

My heart is racing.

I ruminate.

I have all these thoughts.

What if it doesn't happen?

What if, you know, I go through all my embryos?

What if I don't have a child?

All these things that keep coming up and we break that cycle at Love and Science, we make infertility, yes, a very important part of the journey, but just a part, not the entire thing.

We learn how to reclaim the joy that is our birthright.

We learn how to take small moments and be fully embodied and to savor whatever it is that gives us sensory joy and pleasure.

Maybe it's a hot cup of tea.

Maybe it's a hot bath.

Maybe it's being on the yoga mat and just being fully there and the mind is not racing, but it's this embodied sensory experience of life, breathing.

You know, we remind ourselves how to breathe and we do that in community and also in the one-to-one sessions.

And we realize that we can breathe through any experience and we can separate ourselves from the experience, from the threats, from the fear, and we can start to see it for what it is.

So dealing with feelings, even welcoming them, embracing them, talking to them.

You know, I think shame is one that's very big in my room these days.

Well, not every day, but sometimes I can just feel it filling up my space.

And so I just say, "Hi, shame.

How are you today?

And what do you have to tell me?"

And once I give shame a little bit of attention and acknowledge that he's there, then he kind of pipes down and I can live my life.

So that's something that we do is to really explore the full range of human emotions, specifically the ones related to the infertility journey.

And then we gain some agency over our feelings and our inner world, which is amazing.

So with that, I wanted to thank you for being here today.

I fully believe that it takes both love and science to achieve our dreams.

We use the mindful self-compassion teachings, many of which come from Dr.

Kristin Neff to really be in the present moment.

I think we get in trouble when we get stuck in the past and what's happened or when we fear what might happen in the future.

And we use science, we use evidence to separate fact from fiction, and we take powerlessness and we turn it into empowerment so that we can discern the next right thing for us and our fertility journey.

So with that, thank you for being here.

I love you dearly.

Can't wait to see you in the next episode.

Bye.

Thank you for listening to the Love and Science podcast.

I'm so glad you joined us today.

If you found this conversation valuable, if you could please rate, review, and share this podcast with your trusted people, it would mean so much to me.

If you would like more tools to help you navigate the fertility journey, book a free discovery call with me today.

The link is in the show notes.

Please do not let infertility have the final word.

I am here to take the burden from you so that you can achieve your goal of building your family.

In gratitude, this is Dr.

Erica Bove.

I'm rooting for you always.