Did you freak out after watching this episode of 'New Girl'? Jess was freaking out after her gynecologist friend broke the news that a woman can lose up to 90 percent of her eggs by age 30. As cosmopolitan.com points out, Jess's panic session was funny—but do we really lose most of our eggs by age 30?
Dr. Lauren Streicher, assistant clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Northwestern University
Eggs tells Cosmo that eggs "do age, but as long as you are ovulating and it's a good quality egg, it doesn't matter how many you've got in the bank."
Dr. Streicher says egg quality is more important than egg quantity, a factor that just varies from lady to lady. We are born with about 100,000 eggs and we slowly lose them over our lifetime, but there is no magic rule that says egg count drops dramatically at age 30.
"Even if you did lose 90,000 eggs by age 30, who cares?" she says. "You’ve still got 10,000. That's enough for 10,000 babies." Which would be about 9,998 more than a lot of us could handle!
Well, that's all well and good, but sounds a little bit too simple and too good to be true. So I scrolled down to the comments of the article.
A woman pointed out a study that was featured on abc two years ago: http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/women-fertility-falls-lose-90-percent-eggs-30/story?id=9693015#.UMH6wJPjnIZ.
Dr. Marie Savard, a "Good Morning America" medical contributor, discussed a study which looked at the egg supply of 325 women of varying ages from the UK, the US, and also Europe and answered some frequently asked fertility questions for women.
The full study can be found here: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0008772.
The most important point that the findings of the study shows is that women lose eggs a lot faster than was previously thought, and that by the age of 30, we lose about 90% of our egg reserves!
The GMA piece did answer the question that the 'New Girl' episode brought up for many of us about having your eggs counted. The answer? It's not possible. You can measure the size of your ovaries and test your hormone levels, but there is no way to know for sure how many quality eggs you have left.
What is the take away message of this study & news story? Have kids earlier rather than later if possible.
I'm 31, and B & I are planning on doing IVF when I'm 32 if we are not pregnant on our own yet. We started out on this whole infertility road when I turned 27, and started seeking help when I was 29. When we started, I was still at a healthy reproductive age and by the time we hopefully get pregnant with ART I'll be entering the age of those poor women who "waited too long" to have kids. Not fair.
I wish they didn't blame it so much on women's rights and career driven goals. Some of us try to start at a younger age and still face these issues. ART is expensive for most of us, and so we don't always have the luxury of jumping into IVF as soon as we find out that conceiving naturally won't come easy to us.
I can have a career and not blame my infertility on it.
So Prince William & Princess Kate are pregnant. I'm curious and my attention directly gets sucked into any news about their condition... and I should be happy for them like the rest of the world, but I'm not.
I always kind of felt like my life mirrored Prince William's. My parents got married the same year as Charles & Diana, and I'm only about 9 months older than the first-born prince. I got married about 10 months before the current Duke & Duchess of Cambridge, and I just hoped in my silly-little fantasy mind of mine that we'd get pregnant around the same time as the royal couple.
I don't wish the heartache of infertility on anyone, but part of me takes comfort when celebrities share their stories of infertility tragedy & triumph. I'm glad the princess is NOT suffering from infertility, but if she was, like me, it would bring a lot more awareness to a growing problem in modern society.
If infertility wasn't such a stigma, and more people talked openly about it, and more became aware of it, maybe someday ART could be covered by health insurance and our pocketbooks wouldn't determine our eligibility to conceive and give birth.
Like I said yesterday, B & I need to move to a European country where this stuff is covered so I can stop projecting my own angst onto every celebrity, acquaintance, friend, and relative who gets pregnant.
Seriously, I'm upset about Princess Kate being pregnant (and announcing it at 8 weeks, that just seems cocky!)? As the title of this post says, it just goes to show you how cray cray I'm really becoming. Glad I can say these things here so I don't have to say them out loud! Maybe there is something to that Dutch study about involuntarily childless couples having a higher risk of psychiatric illness... ;)
I've blogged about infertility themes on Grey's Anatomy before, in fact, I started watching the show again earlier this year (all 8 seasons, from beginning to end) just because I heard they were struggling with infertility. I also learned about Derek's ex wife, Addison's infertility troubles on Private Practice at around the same time.
I loved the adoption episode, when Meredith says that they tell you when you're going through the adoption process that, "The baby you have is the baby you were destined to have. It was meant to be."
To learn more about what Meredith & Derek's infertility diagnosis is, follow this link: http://www.wetpaint.com/greys-anatomy/articles/behind-the-medical-jargon-what-is-a-hostile-uterus.
Anyway, if I'm being honest, I have to admit that the recent turn of events, in which Meredith tells Derek she's 3 weeks pregnant really disappointed me. I should be happy for her. I should be rooting for a formal infertile sister who finally gets what we all want so badly. But I can't.
I can't because it's not real anyway. She is a fictitious character. Although it comforted me that in her storyline the writers had her sharing similar experiences as me, and brought awareness to the struggle so many of us face, I feel that having her just get miraculously pregnant without going round after round of ART just isn't fair.
It's like they are just validating the bane of every infertile woman's existence, the comment,"if you just relax and stop trying so hard, it will just happen."
In fact, I'm so mad about this, I can barely get into it.
I see in the most recent episode Meredith needs to schedule her 8 week ultrasound. I know how horrible this sounds, but I was hoping they'd have her miscarry again, but it's starting to look like they might go through with this and give them a baby. If she miscarried again though, it would bring more awareness to what so many women go through in their quest to become mothers. Getting our hopes built up so high just to have them all dashed without a moment's notice.
Yes, Mer miscarried once, but it was before she was even trying. Then she tried for a few months, and they gave up and adopted Zola. Now, they are magically back together, their house (which took them 8 seasons to slowly build and they got nowhere with it), is all the sudden finished and they are living in it with their happy little baby Zola. And now they are surprised with an unexpected pregnancy.
This is not real. And it's not fair to all of us who are not going to get this fairytale ending. Have them go through a few rounds of IVF. Show the details. Show the heartache. Show what it does to a relationship. Then let something happen whatever way you want it to, writers! But don't give this to them so easily. It's a disservice to the beautiful work you started out to do in highlighting this plight that effects so many.
The previews for the winter-season finale lef us with a bit of a cliff-hanger, having Mer express her fear that she'll miscarry again and Derek giving her a concerned look. So we'll see I guess. I know I'll be tuned it to see this thing play out either way.
On Rock Center with Brian Williams on Thursday night, there was a quick report about a Dutch study that was recently published in the December issue of Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, which finds that childless couples don't live as long as those with kids.
Being the good librarian that I am, I did some research and found the original article, which turns out to be much more interesting than these popular media sources are letting on.
The study finds that childless women's risk of premature death (such as cancer, circulatory disease, and accidents) is four times higher than those who gave birth to their own children, and twice as high as women who adopt a child.
It also finds that men who don't become fathers are twice as likely to suffer from premature (or crude as the study refers to it) death than men who either have biological children or adopt (it's apparently all the same to the guys I guess).
The really interesting part that you have to dig into the original study itself to really find, is that this study also differentiates between voluntary and involuntary childlessness.
The nature of the study is inherently causes the researchers to look at this from the perception of the involuntary childless.... because their entire pool of subjects are couples undergoing IVF treatments!
The news media sources don't highlight this, but the other major finding of this article is not only that the involuntary childless don't just have a higher mortality rate, we have a higher risk of psychiatric illness too. I can 100% believe this.
Interesting tidbit I learned from the article: In Denmark, couples must attempt IVF before they can adopt, and the government provides 3 free cycles of IVF!
B & I really need to move to Europe, A) so we can do IVF and finally have a baby, and B) so we can apparently live longer and not go crazy :)
So right after returning from India, I got super sick. I mean like crazy, literally sleeping all day & all night for four days in a row, barely eating, cold/flu-like symtoms sick.
Don't worry, it wasn't anything I caught from travelling to India... more likely it was from travelling in general, after being stuck on planes for 20 hours in that dry non-circulating air, I was bound to come down with something.
As soon as I started to recover from that, I got my period (see yesterday's post). So there went nearly another week.
After being down for the count for two weeks, I haven't been feeling too hot... just kind of tired and achy. I've probably just been sitting at my desk for too long trying to get caught up on work.
Ok, so my purpose for sharing all this, is to illustrate why I've been taking a lot of over-the-counter medications lately. Specifically ibuprofen.
This has been my go-to-drug since I hit puberty in my pre-teens. During the week of my period, I'll often take three 200-mg pills every three hours for the first three days! Later, in my mid-twenties when I unknowingly suffered from a herniated disk causing me chronic pain and sciatic nerve damage for three years, I self-medicated nearly daily with ibuprofen.
Since having back-surgery in 2008, I feel like I've become more of a normal person again with my ibuprofen intake, though it's still my preferred drug of choice whenever I get period cramps, headaches, or other random pains.
Anywhoo, like I said above, I've been feeling pretty crummy for the past (nearly) three weeks or so, and B noticed me taking a lot of ibuprofen just to get through the days.
So he became concerned and started doing some simple googling and showed me this: http://www.conceiveonline.com/articles/which-medicines-could-affect-your-chances-getting-pregnant.
In this article, it states the following about ibuprofen:
"Common pain relievers such as the NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, which include Advil, Motrin, and Aleve) can sabotage conception, particularly if taken regularly. They may block production of prostaglandins, hormone-like chemicals that regulate inflammation and temperature. But they may also throw off the release of an egg each month. If you’re trying to get pregnant, stop taking ibuprofen from right before ovulation. 'But it’s perfectly alright to take it for menstrual cramps,' says Dr. Carson. Or try acetaminophen (Tylenol) instead."
So this was on Monday night... and of course after some additional quick googling on my part (I even found this one now while searching for an image for this post: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/sep/06/ibuprofen-warning-to-pregnant-women), I found enough chatter on this subject (none of it disproving it, though nothing very scholarly either), that I quit taking ibuprofen cold-turkey.
It's now Friday and I feel like I'm dying! So many aches & pains and I have to feel them all :(
But I'm in the midst of my fertile period, and of course, if I'm not taking ibuprofen right now and this happens to be the one and only time we've ever gotten pregnant, I'm going to have to blame everything on the loads of Advil I've been taking, lol!
When my period comes in a few weeks I'll load up again. This will just be something I cut out for a while during the rest of my non-menstruating days of the cycle... just in case.
After all the half-hearted India baby hopes last month, I thought I should throw out a quick update.
We can all be relieved to know that my period came like clockwork the day I expected it, and ended exactly when it was supposed to.
There was some concern that the travel/time changes would throw my cycle off like it may have earlier this fall after a trip to Finland & Russia, but fortunately my first cycle upon returning from India was right on track (as was the previously cycle which I had while I was there too).
So, while it's as sad as it always is when I get my period month after month and always find out I'm yet again not pregnant, at least my cycle isn't messed up.
The bright side (or exhausting & futile side) is that it means we get another chance to start trying all over again this month.... yay.... [insert sarcastic tone of voice and eye roll here].
Seriously though, I'm not bummed about it. Relieved there's nothing new to worry about like there was in September/October.
