My Fertility Journey - Catherine Needham, PharmD
As teenagers, many of us learned about cycles through teen magazines, our friends, and maybe our parents. At 16 or 17, I certainly only thought of a menstrual cycle as a period—nothing more. So when I was training for another season of cross-country and hadn’t had a period in a year, I thought I had just saved myself the trouble of a year’s worth of hygiene products. I knew that many lean distance runners didn’t have periods, so I figured it wasn’t problematic—for the time being, anyway. My GYN felt differently, and I was started on an oral contraceptive to mimic normal hormone fluctuations. One pill per day didn’t seem like a big deal, so I took them to mask the low-body- weight/training-induced irregularity… for seven years.
Fast forward to my mid-20s when I had a stable job, a husband, a 4-bedroom house, and a dog. Our perfect life was just missing a little baby to round it out. Time to finally stop taking birth control! A few months later, a routine appointment with my Ob/Gyn led to an appointment with a reproductive endocrinologist.
As a side note, I was referred to a specialist sooner than the 12 months many women wait because I had started some rudimentary charting—enough to know that something was off with my body. I knew I was not ovulating regularly. Oftentimes, in the absence of a fertility-related diagnosis, couples are given one year of “trying to conceive” before they are referred, but I pinpointed some information for my GYN that allowed me to go on to a specialist after just a few months.
Several rounds of oral ovulation induction were fruitless. It felt like 100 rounds of treatments, but it was probably only 3 or 4. I received a phone call while at work one day. It was the physician on the phone personally. They said, “I mean, we can get you pregnant, it just may not be the way you wanted.”
I sank to the floor. “What do you mean, not the way I wanted?”
I was devastated and exhausted, thinking “Maybe you can get me to ovulate with enough medication, but what is actually the problem?” I wanted to FIX my body so that I had my own cycle with my own chance of conception—especially because I was only 25 or 26 years old, in otherwise decent health, and had experienced sporadic ovulation. (I realize how fortunate I was for those things.)
We took a break from trying to conceive, and I started seeing a functional medicine physician and an acupuncturist. I cut certain foods out of my diet. I cut back my long-distance running. My low thyroid function was treated. I took the acupuncturist’s herbal concoction along with some evidence-based supplements to address the underlying metabolic dysfunction. Most importantly, I observed my body and charted every detail.
After months of trying to get my body to reset and looking at every possible underlying issue, we found out I was pregnant. We now have three boys 5 and under.
When you are experiencing infertility, it can seem like everyone around you has a rosy, fairy-tale ending with their healthy pregnancy and baby—even if they had difficulty conceiving at first. You wonder, “how will my story end? How will I recount this chapter of my life?” It can feel like running a full sprint with no defined finish line; it takes every bit of effort you can possibly muster to get through each day, only to wonder how many more days, weeks, months, years you might carry this heaviness inside.
While I am so grateful for my little boys, I still feel the pang of sorrow in my chest when I think of those seasons of waiting for our turn to post a pregnancy announcement on social media. I am fortunate to have my professional work align with a personal passion as close to me as fertility, and feeling the weight of infertility allows me to relate to our couples in a way I could have never imagined before. It is never lost on me how miraculous each journey is.
Empowered Fertility Event
I’m excited to share more about my fertility journey and how cycle charting helped me in my upcoming event Empowered Fertility taking place Thursday, January 13th 6:30-8pm at Common House Chattanooga.
This will be a free event and everyone interested in learning about the process of conceiving and understanding some of the obstacles standing in your way and how to overcome them is welcome!
CATHERINE NEEDHAM is from Chattanooga and joined the Designer Drug team in 2013 after earning her PharmD at Samford University in Birmingham, AL. Catherine consults with patients regarding their hormone levels and makes recommendations to providers for bio-identical hormone replacement therapy. She is also interested in functional/anti-aging medicine, infertility, and dermatology. In addition to serving as a Samford University preceptor to teach 4th-year pharmacy students, Catherine is a worship leader at her church. She and her husband have 3 young boys and a dog.
