[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to Start to finish Motherhood, a.
[00:00:06] Speaker B: Podcast for those thinking or already single mothers by choice.
[00:00:10] Speaker A: Just looking for practical advice for navigating life's relationships. When you decide to have children on.
[00:00:15] Speaker C: Your own, it doesn't mean that you're completely alone.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: I'm Aisha Jenkins and I'm partnering with you every step of your journey.
[00:00:26] Speaker C: Okay, so this update for this episode. Let's see. In the past 11 years, the stats on the experiences of black people.
Black birthing people is still really precarious, if not even worse.
Sadly, within the medical establishment, I just don't think that people care.
I recently lost a dear friend of mine, dear, due to medical racism, and she had two hospital visits and the medical staff dropped the ball.
This loss hit me really deeply and it still, it has me shook. I can't believe that she's not here.
I'll just do a moment of silence.
Parents, we still have to be very aware and we still have to battle on and advocate for ourselves and for our children.
If you ever feel that you are uncomfortable with your medical professional, take somebody with you to be your backup or switch to a new medical provider. I have done that in the past when I didn't feel heard or listened to and I let them know why and. And then I escalated it and wrote formal letters. So don't be afraid to be that loud and aggressive person advocating for you or your children's health.
Treatments, diagnostic procedures. Yeah, go kicking and screaming if you need to. I think the system has us so afraid of being the angry black parents, and if it comes down to it, be the angry black parent. You are the only person who knows your medical history, and if you are a single parent, you are the only person who knows your children's medical history.
So take that and do with it with you what you must. I have an 11 year old and we have recently started talking about family medical history because God forbid something happens to me, I don't want there to be gaps in her knowledge of her family medical history.
Assess how your medical team responds when you ask questions, especially when you ask clarifying questions. Do they listen? Do they pause? Do they respond thoughtfully? Do they blow you off? Those are all indications as to whether you stay with your provider or you move on. You do have choices.
If you feel uncomfortable, unsupported, unheard, if you feel mistreated, move expeditiously to find a new provider. Leave all situations that are not good for your health. Keep your bodies moving. The state of healthcare in this country, the state of our food systems, has me really cautious and on edge. And so right now, the best defense is to just stay as healthy as possible, stay on top of your health maintenance appointments and drink lots of water, get lots of rest, reduce stress. And I think the last bit of update here is that when I was trying to start my family and grow my family, a lot of the rhetoric that I got from the male dominated field of reproductive endocrinologists was that all of the problems, most of the problems.
[00:04:05] Speaker B: Resided with the woman's egg and the.
[00:04:07] Speaker C: Age of the woman updates is that research is currently starting to show more and more that sperm quality and age of the male plays a role in successful pregnancies and successful outcomes.
That's the last bit of the updates for this episode.
Let's jump into this throwback episode.
[00:04:30] Speaker B: In this episode, we're going to dip a little into the medical side of being an smc, specifically discussing some of the things that could potentially go wrong based on our experience.
Again, I want to state up front that we are not doctors and we always recommend that you do your own research and you speak with a medical professional before making any decisions. Okay? So going from the beginning of the process all the way toward the end, starting with, so you want to get yourself knocked up.
Okay, so you decide that you want to get pregnant on your own. The assumption is that we're young, we're fertile, we don't have any fertility issues. Our only fertility issue is that we don't have a partner to provide the sperm. All right, so cool.
A reputable clinic will start you off by running some blood work, doing some initial diagnostics and examining your innards. Once you're into the SMC space, you're going to hear things like, get your three day blood work done. Are you going to have an hsg? What's your, your amh? So all of these are indicators, external indicators of fertility. We won't know how you respond until you start trying. But your day three blood work is pretty much, you go get a blood draw and they're checking your hormone levels to see if you are ready to proceed with your cycle. AMH is going to tell you the health of your ovaries. Follicle counts are going to tell you how many dormant follicles you have. And an HSG is just going to tell you how clearly your internal uterine fallopian tube environment is. And so you get to determine to what extent you're going to take on any of these diagnostics. From my own personal opinion is that if you're going to Put down the amount of money that you're putting down for some of these procedures. You want to give yourself the best first chance that you can. So, yeah, so it's balancing costs with maximizing each try.
Yeah. And so for me, since I was a total novice, they gave me a checklist. I'm checking items off the list. Hsg, day three, blood work, go to the corner, buy coffee. And so what I found through my diagnostics is that I had a fibroid. And I had known that I'd had a couple small fibroids, but I had one that against the uterine wall, and that could potentially negatively impact an embryo implanting. And first thing I knew I needed to do was to get that fibroid removed. And so that was my, probably my second invasive procedure because I had the HSG that showed that I had the fibroid. And so I got the fibroid removed before I proceeded further with my first pregnancy. And then also during my second pregnancy, the workup, oh, I was a disaster then and so had a miscarriage already.
I had retained placental tissue, which caused just a catastrophic cascade of events. And so for those of you who don't know when you're pregnant, there are a few different systems that are involved in the pregnancy. Right. There's the endocrine system, which are all of the hormones, pituitary gland, the insulin. All of those things get triggered your immune system. And pretty much all of those came into play with my second pregnancy. They played a big role. After having a number of miscarriages, I silently slipped into a pre diabetic stage where having uncontrolled diabetes could negatively impact the pregnancy. I also had an immune response with the delivery of my first daughter, which I did not know of, that caused a lot of catastrophic events and miscarriages along my journey. And so we'll get into that. With both of my pregnancies, I had a challenge. So with my first pregnancy, it was fairly textbook until the delivery. And my daughter was delivered strongly jaundiced. So they ran some tests and they found that she had hemolytic disease of the newborn, which basically means that that my immune system attacked her blood. And yeah, so she spent a good week in the hospital. She was under five, UV lights, naked, just to process out the bilirubin that built up and was giving her the yellow coloring. And so what I didn't know at the time, and what I strongly suspect is that because my immune system was activated during that pregnancy, that I maintained antibodies against my daughter's type A blood and I'm type O. And so when I went to try for my second daughter, I used the same donor that I use for my daughter, which had type AB blood and I'm type O.
So being a biologist and knowing what I know now, I needed to not have any type A embryos implant because they would not survive. So my first miscarriage was with my first IVF in my attempt for my second daughter.
And I miscarried at eight and a half weeks. I miscarried naturally, but I maintain a bit of placenta, which caused me to continue to bleed periodically, probably for a few weeks. And so this is where choosing the right fertility clinic comes into play. Because my fertility clinic dropped the ball in terms of communicating with me, because they have to track you and monitor your HCG levels until they get down to zero.
And so they had stopped reaching out to me, I had stopped reaching out to them.
And so then I didn't realize I had retained placental tissue. I was so devastated over the entire experience. This was the real low point. And I needed to find a fertility clinic that was gentle in their approach to how they handled their patients. And so I found an off the beaten track fertility clinic. This woman was about to retire and she said, I'll take you on as a client. And she let me talk, we did talk therapy. She ran tests and she found that I had retained placenta tissue. So she tracked my HCG down and she was just like, you need to go and get a dnc. And so she was like, I can't do that. You have to go back to your original clinic. So I was in limbo for a while, but she advocated for me. She wrote to that previous doctor, she's, you need to fix this. This is your problem, you need to correct this. And they were like, they don't know if it's their pregnancy. And so she was just like, no, you need to fix this. She came to me on this, this date, blah, blah, blah. And so she advocated for me. Eventually I, I went to my own OB GYN who I had a relationship with, they did a dnc, they ran the genetic testing, was a genetically normal girl. So that was my experience. So I had tried a couple more times with the same donor and I was just like, I need to switch clinics, I need to, I need to change donor sperm. So I changed donor sperm because I suspected what was going on. But nobody else would put any weight in immunity aspects of trying to conceive. And then also be aware that a lot of the fertility industry does not give weight to the immunity aspects of pregnancy. And so in the African American community, we do have occurrences of autoimmune diseases. If you are dealing with an autoimmune disease, I would probably ask your reproductive endocrinologist specific questions with how much weight and how do they handle the autoimmune aspects? Right. Because we're coming up to if you are not getting pregnant, what could possibly go wrong? But before I hopped to that, I did end up being successful with switching to a donor that had my blood type. I ended up having a beautiful baby girl on the first try with that donor. By me advocating for myself it and having a medical provider who advocated for me, I ended up achieving success.
So you're trying to get pregnant and it's not happening. What could possibly be going wrong?
All right, so there are a few things that you want to look at. You're fairly healthy. Nothing showed up on your fertility diagnostics in terms of needing to be fixed. So there's the egg sperm aspect.
Something could either be wrong with eggs, you could be an older mom who's trying. There could be an issue with the sperm, it could be low motility, it could just not be high quality sperm. When you choose your sperm donor, when you go to do an iui, your doctor is going to give you some stats on your sperm, the motility, the count. Some of us are type A people, so we jot all of this down. So you got the egg and sperm. So once the egg and sperm meet up, do they fertilize? So that's another aspect, implantation. So now that the embryo is created, how well does it implant or adhere to your u uterus? And then there's the embryonic development. So is the embryo a normal embryo, causing it to develop normally? So any one of these elements of fertility could impact your success factors or could be a reason why you are not getting pregnant. And you can kick these apart. A reputable reproductive endocrinologist will have that conversation with you and talk about different things that you can try. I tried some experimental things with my successful cycle. Like I tried an HCG wash, I tried a uterine scratch. So look, final clinic that I went to was like a spa. So they had a whole pre transfer package. And yeah, I did all of that.
So you're pregnant, right? That's what we all get to that bfp, that big fat pregnancy. And you got your reward, you're past the first trimester, you're glowing. What could possibly go wrong?
[00:14:19] Speaker C: A lot.
[00:14:20] Speaker B: So for me, my second pregnancy it was hard conceiving. And then the second trimester, first trimester was fine. Everything was a breeze. I hit my 28 week checkup, 30 week checkup, where they got concerned that the baby looked small.
And so they were like, I wouldn't worry about it. We'll check you in your next four week checkup and we'll see where the baby is. And hopefully she recovered, but she did not.
And so that was a devastating visit because they immediately made an appointment for me with the maternal fetal specialist, the MFM.
And when I went to that appointment at probably 36 weeks, they thought that the complication would lead to microcephaly. And if you're familiar with the Zika stories, that means a small, obviously small head size. And unfortunately, they couldn't make the diagnosis through pre delivery mechanisms. So I had to wait until my daughter was delivered in order for them to make a final diagnosis. That was challenging. And so I absorbed that.
I leaned on my village to get me through that period. And that day I cried. But I had to be done by five o' clock because I had to pick up my big girl.
And so I made the decision in that moment. After I cried my tears, I was like, I can't do anything now. I'm not going to allow my joy to be stolen. I'm going to love this baby. And I wasn't prepared for the prospect of having a special needs child, but God gave her to me and so I was going to do my best to be that child's mom.
Now, thankfully, my baby was born with a big giant head. She was small. She was 5lbs 12oz compared to 7lbs 12oz for her sister. But she recovered that weight and then some in two weeks. So she's thankfully a very healthy, vocal, rambunctious little girl. But those are just some of the things that can go wrong. The stats. Black women are, what, three times more likely to die from complications due to birth or post birth situations than any other ethnic group. So for me, I would recommend that advocating for yourself starts at step negative one, right? The moment you know that you're going to be doing this on your own, you start evaluating your medical team. Like, how do you like your OB gyn? How do you like your reproductive endocrinologist when you get one? How are they at listening to your concerns and giving you space to express those concerns? Do they make you feel comfortable? I would recommend that you use your entire appointment time. If they say, do you have questions? I have questions, even stuff that come up in the moment, have questions. Do you have any concerns? I know when I was worried about my daughter's size, I let my medical team know. I'm concerned. I cried.
I'm not this strong black woman. I am concerned. I am vulnerable. I cannot go home without a baby. Both me and the baby need to come home alive because I have a five year old, right? And so I made sure that my medical team knew my situation so that when it came time for delivery, they talked it over with me. My OB was like, look, this baby is not coming as fast as we'd like her to. We want to try this other med. The other option is a C section, but I don't want to give you a C section and send you home to recover with a 5 year old @ home and a newborn. So we're going to try this new med. Are you okay with that? We talked through some of the implications and we moved ahead with the additional medication and it worked. So you start interviewing your medical team fairly early on so that if they are there for you, you need to let them know you're going to partner with them. Because you're an smc, you're going to partner with them. They should know your home sit situation and then also make sure your village is out for you and advocating for you in the delivery room. All right. I hope you enjoyed this discussion and insight into the complications that could potentially arise. Tips for how you can advocate for yourself.
So to that, thank you for joining us this week. If you like what you heard, please share it with your social media circle. Tell your grandma, tell your mama, tell your friends, tell your co workers.
Thanks for.
[00:18:42] Speaker A: Listening. To Start to Finish Motherhood with Aisha. If you want to keep the conversation going, follow Start to Finish Motherhood on Instagram.
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[email protected] if you love this episode, please share it with anyone who's thinking of becoming a single mother by choice. Anyone who's already parenting as a single mother by choice and just looking for advice on navigating it all. Or a friend or family member who's looking to support someone else's single mother by choice journey. Until next time, bye.
