My Story

This is going to sound silly - my fear of infertility started at the age of 12 at a friend’s parents party. I was sitting in a small, dimly lit room across from a woman who held my hand upright, tracing across the lines of my hand. “You will have no children” she said, “just two significant pets”. Now this may not be entirely untrue, my two boys Santi and Arlo could be considered animals in many ways, but this one sentence from the palm reader at the party planted a seed in me. A seed of doubt that I would never be able to have kids, a fear that perhaps would be unexpected in a girl who had never even been on a first date.

 

As the years went by, this little doubt stayed buried away in the back of my mind. I went on the birth control pill at the age of 15 and stayed on it for nearly 10 years, all the while thinking I was having my regular monthly period. At the age of 25 I had already been married for a couple of years and we were beginning to talk about having a family. I was a student at Bastyr University studying Nutrition & Dietetics and a benefit to that was discounted services such as acupuncture and Chinese Medicine. During one of these first appointments, the woman across the table from me, a Chinese Medicine doctor, was taking an inventory of my medical history and asked me about birth control. When I told her I had been taking the pill for 10 years she stopped in her tracks - she said, “You have to get off of that immediately”. And I did.