To pick up on the story I began in my post And So It Begins, the next hindered step in my fertility journey was ovulation therapy. I have found through this experience that I find Western medical terminology and tradition very strange. For instance, the word "therapy." Therapy is defined as "treatment intended to relieve or heal a disorder" and oftentimes, the word is applied appropriately. But sometimes, it seems to be used on things that end up feeling pretty bad, despite their intended use of healing.
However, ovulation therapy is a pretty simple concept, and when I left the doctor's office with a prescription for birth control and orders for how to carry out ovulation therapy, I thought that all my woes were over in regards to getting pregnant. And for a while, they were. I went back on my normal pill and felt SO, SO much better. At the end of July, when my pills ran out, Hubster and I eagerly anticipated our coming adventure. It was exciting and thrilling to think that soon we would be trying to have a baby!
The only black spot on my delight was the worksheet that the doctor had handed me that detailed our plan for ovulation therapy. At the top of the worksheet, the bold, black letters said "Infertility Worksheet." When I read that I immediately bristled thought, I am not infertile, then told myself to forget and it was no big deal.
When my period came and went after my last pack of pills, I diligently began counting days. On days 3 through 7 of my cycle, I swallowed the tiny pink tabs I had been prescribed: 2.5 mg of Letrazole, the generic brand of Femora, a drug that stimulates ovulation. At the time, I went about my days and eagerly waited to hit day 12, when I could start peeing on those nifty ovulation predictor kit sticks.
Hubster and I discovered quickly that the simple two line OPKs were anything but nifty. The directions read "When the test line is similar to or darker than the control line" and we found that it was hard to tell!!! But we persevered and a week after that first positive OPK, I went in for a blood draw to test my progesterone levels. As you can guess, August came and went without pregnancy. My doctor said that my progesterone levels were perfect, so all was clear to try again in September.
September came around and we got ready to try again. Once more, I took the little pills, and once more Hubster and I waited until I could start testing with OPKs. We upgraded to digital test, FYI, to make our lives a little easier. When we got a positive, we took care of business, and then a week later I went in for a blood draw.
The news wasn't good this time, though. The blood draw this time showed that my progesterone was low, which indicated that I had not ovulated yet. In reaction to this news, the doctor decided that we needed to up the Letrazole dose, as low progesterone indicated that I was not yet in the luteal phase of my cycle.
When the next period came and went, I swallowed my double dose of Letrazole and went on my way. But it turned out that I couldn't just go on my way. For the five days I was on Letrazole, I was completely beside myself. The best way I can describe it is to say that on the hormones, EVERYTHING was a big deal. All things, whether they were big or small, I couldn't deal with any of it. The moment that I knew something had to change was the afternoon I found myself bawling my eyes out on the kitchen floor. There had been a relatively small family drama in my life, and I couldn't handle it AT ALL.
It was around this time that my cousin, who struggled with fertility herself, introduced me to the idea of using Fertility Awareness Method, the concept that Kindara promotes. FAM is pretty simple: it teaches that through being aware of your fertility signs (Basal Body Temperature, Cervical Fluid, and Cervical Position), you can be aware of when you are fertile and when you are not. It's great for achieving pregnancy, it's great for avoiding pregnancy, and it's great for understanding your body.
Right after I finished the double dose of Letrazole, I began doing some reading on FAM, and then downloaded Kindara on my phone and bought a BBT thermometer. As I started charting my temps and learning about what your cervical fluid does throughout your cycle, I began to suspect a few things that ultimately became critical in understanding my body and what was happening.
One of the most interesting discoveries I have made about the medical community and women's cycles is that Western Medicine works from a model that is static: menstrual cycles are 28 days long, and ovulation occurs at the midpoint, day 14. But when you consider the reality that most women have varying cycles, shorter or longer than 28 days, this formulaic approach is not relevant. Ovulation Therapy assumes a 28 day cycle. It also assumes that Ovulation Predictor Kits (OPKs) work, and there is plenty of evidence that they do not.
Below is a chart of a menstrual cycle. While the days vary, the pattern of the cycle does not:
Once ovulation occurs, you can see that the green line, Progesterone, goes up. High Progesterone levels in the blood a week after a positive OPK confirms whether or not ovulation actually occurred.
What I discovered through charting was groundbreaking for Hubster and me. Fertility wasn't my problem, our timing was. First, the first chart I recorded, I took OPKs as directed. They gave us a positive for ovulation long before the other signs (slippery cervical fluid and high BBT) did. Our conclusion was that we had most likely been trying to get pregnant too early and missing ovulation, as the second fact my chart revealed was that I have longer cycles and ovulate late.
I realize that I just gave you a pretty technical overview of menstrual cycles, and that's not really what I am here for. The point that I really want to make is this: this step in the journey was difficult but so freeing for the moment that I realized there was a good chance I wasn't infertile. I didn't need an infertility worksheet, I just needed to understand my body.
And that, my dear friends, is the point I want to dwell on. I wonder how many women have suffered through moments or months of anguish over the possibility of being infertile when really what they needed was to understand their bodies and be able to try for conception at the right time.
Much of the information that I gave you in this post is from the Kindara website and Toni Weschler's FABULOUS book, Taking Charge of Your Fertility. When my friend Sarah read this book (cover to cover in a short period of time), her text to me asked why the information in the book was not part of our common knowledge. And it's a good question.
Understanding our bodies and what they do and need is critical to being healthy and removing much of the fear and shame and anxiety that can often accompany medical problems and attention.
There's still more to the story, but I think that's enough for now. Step by step we're moving forward, and even though we've not been able to get pregnant yet, I finally feel like we are on the right track and making progress.
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