One of the first questions I often get asked is about age and ability to conceive. If you are over 35, you are welcome in our program. In fact, many of the women in our program are starting their fertility journey later in life for whatever reasons. The reasons don’t matter. What does matter is that you have a heart and desire to be a mother, and thats the only reason you need. Fertility optimization and restoration is possible in women right into their mid 40’s. Women tell me they are told by doctors to go straight to IVF or donor eggs if they have low AMH or if they are over 40. There is nothing worse than the cookie cutter fertility approach, where women are told that they are too old or advanced in maternal age. At FertilityCare Calgary, we have been successful in helping many women in their forties, without resorting to invasive procedures. How do we do this? And how long does it take?
Every Woman Has A Story
Every woman in our program has a different story to tell. We are here to listen to it. Our job is to try to fill in the missing pieces, parts of that story that may have been forgotten, overlooked, or misdiagnosed. The first step sounds simplistic, but its the most important one: listening to the language of your own body with a fertility chart. What is it trying to tell you? You can translate your fertility health by looking for observations that every woman can recognize. Our instructors use the Creighton Model FertilityCare System to decode your fertility. Once this is done, we use the chart to identify days that are within your fertility window, and help you to time the bloodwork that is necessary to dive deeper into this mystery. A single random luteal phase hormone level is not enough and can misidentify the problem. It only takes two months to find out where the underlying fertility issues originate. There is always and explanation, and when we find it, it brings such relief to women and couples. The answer provides a fast track to a treatment plan, and the plan gives encouragement and hope.
Starting Later In Life
There are some cases that stay with you in your career, and two women come to mind when I think about those who started families later in their lives. The first patient was forty-five years of age and had been through an evaluation at the fertility clinic. She decided that invasive and costly procedures were not for her. She had a previous ectopic pregnancy with one remaining tube, a fibroid, one follicle on her ovary and her AMH was at 0.5. She was told she would never get pregnant and that there was no chance of AMH increasing. AMH is not the greatest indicator of fertility outcomes, but women feel really discouraged when they are told the opposite. In her case, AMH did increase and she did achieve pregnancy at the age of forty-six within six months of optimizing her hormones. Upon assessing her luteal phase hormones, it was clear that her late luteal phase progesterone was suboptimal. This is fairly common in women of perimenopausal age, as the corpus luteum may be struggling to support the cycle as it once did. The other important piece was having her start low dose naltrexone, which can help improve the brain hormone pathways to function more optimally. Small changes and perseverance were all that were required to help her have a healthy baby boy.
Case Of A 46 Year Old Woman
The second case was a 46 year old woman who seemed to be in good health on the outside. However, she had a history of very long fertility cycles. She had never been diagnosed with PCOS and was not told that long cycles were abnormal. She had just gotten married and they wanted to try to achieve pregnancy. What many women with PCOS don’t realize is that their AMH can be higher than normal. This actually translates into extending the age available for achieving pregnancy—a silver lining for many. So why is it that women with PCOS struggle to get pregnant? One of the big reasons is that they are suboptimal in progesterone during their luteal phase because the ovulation leading up to it is unhealthy. Their bodies may also have an immune system intolerance from low progesterone or become progesterone resistant. Correcting the progesterone levels in her case were all that was needed. She used isomolecular progesterone for ten days to regulate her cycle. This in turn helped her to ovulate on her own. Lo and behold, she conceived that very first cycle after starting progesterone. She continued progesterone throughout her pregnancy, delivering her baby at the age of forty-six.
Be encouraged! Optimizing your health and hormones not only help you to lead a healthy life but will also help your fertility to be at its best no matter what age.
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