the one with a mid-year update
Hey guys! It’s been a sec. We wanted to pop in with an easy, breezy, beautiful chat about life in 2021.
Let’s set the scene.
(FYI, as that sentence may indicate, Ted and I are pretty much telling this story in tandem. He wrote it, I heavily updated it with zero regard to authorship, it’s confusing, let’s go.)
We were nearly halfway through our projected Battle Plan timeline, and things were not getting better. As you may remember, the point was to grow our family, which includes Rebecca getting healthier, so what the heck?
If anything, Rebecca’s health was worse. Stress levels were rollercoastering. Self-esteem was dropping badly. Weirdly, her weight was slowly but consistently rising. Her basal body temps remained stubbornly low (and were, in fact, getting lower). She wasn’t sleeping, her anxiety/depression was getting worse, there were lots of fun (ahem) digestive and other situations going on, and I was also...not in a great mental space.
We still thought (and think) we’re supposed to be parents and open to life, so (we thought) ...what now?
Fertility meds, bioidentical hormones, every PCOS diet on the internet, and Rebecca’s just getting increasingly depressed and uncomfortable, if not downright ill. And, duh, no kid yet.
Which is fine--if it weren’t for everything else. Our journey towards parenthood is a bumpy one, we get it, and we knew that messing with Rebecca’s hormones wasn’t going to make her feel lovely. And it’d also be different if Rebecca was feeling sick and, like, she was pregnant. We’d get that, too. But for Rebecca to be spiralling before we even really got started with the fun stuff? And for several straight up ‘welp, that just doesn’t make sense’ things to be happening...like the healthy eating+weight gain? Like the high doses of progesterone and increased anxiety? [Ed. note: Progesterone’s supposed to way chill you out.] Like the working out harder and getting more stuff done at work but never being able to sleep, like, ever?
We weren’t okay with that. Aren’t okay with that.
As two logical people who like things that make sense, we didn’t super love the idea that (even if the whole fertility thing wasn’t working out) the measures that we’d implemented to try and make Rebecca’s health markers better regardless weren’t working either.
Maybe (just maybe) ovulation stimulants, various ‘PCOS-friendly’ [and doctor-condoned] keto and paleo and gluten-free and vegan diets, and increasingly rigorous [I had to go on estrogen after a while, too] hormone therapy weren’t for us--or at least weren’t a good idea for us *right now*.
But, like, we’re stubborn and enjoy clear data trends, so we probably went a few months too far with our original battle plan, which DUH resulted in panic attacks and mental breakdowns all around, along with some super special physical symptoms which don’t need to make it to the internet, at least not right now. Anyway, about halfway through our intended Year of Tryin’ Real Hard (...which we started in December, tbh), we decided we needed to hit the brakes on the Fertility Battle Plan and try something else.
We sat on our porch one Saturday night and talked about how thing really weren’t going so good, and decided that we needed to find a way to balance/achieve two really important goals of ours, as follows:
~~~New Goals~~~
- Work towards restoring Rebecca’s health. Manage symptoms of PCOS.
- Make progress toward getting a kid.
- Find a way to do both of those things at the same time...reasonably successfully.
Rationale? We wanna have a kid, but we don’t want my life to suck...for selfish reasons, sure, but also when I have a kid I (Rebecca is typing now) want to...be able to be there for said kid? Anyway. We also read this incredible interview by Simcha Fisher, a beautiful mermaid of a funny human, about NaPro [Catholic infertility treatment] gone terribly wrong...and we looked at each other and were like, nope.
[For now. For now. For now! We also obvi know NaPro can be good. But. Get me healthyish again, and then we’ll talk.]
(Resume Ted typing.)
For Goal #1, Rebecca started following PCOS nutritionist Jessica Ash. She was looking for something entirely different from the pretty clinical/restrictive/off-putting diets she’d been advised to follow, and Ash’s ~vibey~ Insta first caught her eye. She followed Ash’s Insta for a while, implemented a few of Ash’s recommendations (Ed. note: I drink coffee with actual dairy cream in it now instead of taking it neat, as I have for about a decade), and when those seemed to work, she invested in Ash’s course. (Ed. note: Reading this blog of hers kinda did it for me.)
She will write more about this, but she’s a month in and is feeling 100000% better now. A switch, it was flipped. She eats oysters and beef liver and orange juice, like, on the reg. And more fun things. And, just generally - more.
Here’s Ted’s version of the basic gist of what we think happened:
It seems that everyone thought that hormone deficiency related to PCOS could/should be fixed by adding more of those hormones. No one considered that her body might be handling those hormones wrong. A mistimed engine misfires more as more fuel is added. No one considered that her body might think it was in starvation survival mode. A computer behaves differently when in emergency low power mode, so overclocking the fan might not help.
I’d put it with fewer engine/computer analogies, but not necessarily more clearly:
Every PCOS diet on the planet (and I have tried ...all of them) assumes that you’re eating something that’s bad for you, so the cure is to eat an increasingly narrow group of foods. The reason I was drawn to Jessica Ash’s work was her initial assumption that healthy humans should probably be able to eat just about anything--and the main underlying cause of a lot of PCOS symptoms is a seriously broken metabolism. (Metabolism=how your body gets energy and nutrients from what you eat.) As many of the symptoms I was actually experiencing weren’t ‘classic’ PCOS (diabetes, obesity) and were definitely more metabolic/adrenal/low-thyroid, I was like, heyyyy, maybe we should start with that. So I started her course, and realized that I’d probably UNINTENTIONALLY been malnourishing myself for quite some time (years)...which led to metabolism shutdown….which led to bad physical and mental symptoms, and poor acceptance of fertility meds and additional hormones, and duh when your body’s in survival mode on low calories and under siege from extra meds you’re neither gonna perform well nor literally have the bandwidth to procreate.
I think Ted won that one. Anyway.
The new strategy is to get Rebecca enough food, even if the selected foods are counter-intuitive.
(And they have been. I eat so much dairy now….and mandatory daily orange juice.)
So! That’s progress towards Goal #1. Rebecca’s taking daily logs of her temps/pulses/weight/etc, as well as her work productivity and sleep and etc. After two or three months, we’ll put together some super fun charts...so we all have that to look forward to! We may also schedule an appointment with Rebecca’s doctors to re-draw bloodwork, but most of this is going off slightly more subjective growth/benefits/etc.
As for our movement towards Goal #2 (cough, grow our family, cough)...well, I’ve taken a step back from hormone therapy and ovulation stimulants because not only did they seem to be not serving my body super well, we have suspicions that they weren’t even accomplishing their missions that well (this is getting long, so we’ll put a pin in the ‘progesterone makes Rebecca stress out more wait why?’ story for now).
That said, we’re actually more optimistic than ever about having a bio-kid at some point. Reproduction requires an excess of energy; if I’ve been chronically undernourishing myself, then, um, duh, well, suddenly we may be able to see our issue. Our diagnoses never really made sense anyway; so we’re gonna go with the ‘just get Rebecca healthy’ tack for a while and see what happens.
But, you know, we’re coming up on our fourth anniversary and no kid yet--which is fine, but we also don’t want to...keep postponing things. We’ll talk about our more concrete plans for Goal #2 in an upcoming blog.
In the meantime, remember to check out Rebecca’s tour guide commentaries on Grimm stories. You can find Ted over on Twitter at @tedtrahedron, talking with Percy the Mars Rover and sharing puppy stories. We’re excited for a music festival and National Take Your Dog To Work Day later this month.