CYBEX Hot Mom Walk Podcast

CYBEX Hot Mom Walk Episode #16: My Journey to Motherhood with Theresa Hudson

• CYBEX • Season 2 • Episode 16

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In this episode, we hear from one of our new Mama Mentors, Theresa Hudson (@eastcoastivfmom).

Listen as she tells the story of how she became a mom. It’s a story of hope, loss, perseverance and miracles.

Theresa’s vulnerability gives listeners a unique learning experience about infertility and helps bring us all closer. Whether you can relate to Theresa’s story or know someone who can, know that no matter what your journey to motherhood looks like — you are never alone.

Warning: this episode features topics that may be triggering to some people. Listener discretion is advised.

Show notes:
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Hello and welcome to the Cybex Hot Mom Walk podcast. Cybex started this series as a recent study found that 80 % of women at three months postpartum say they feel more alone than ever. Designed to help mitigate feeling isolated, the Cybex Hot Mom Walk podcast series aims to help moms across North America cope with the feeling of isolation and the huge identity shift that comes with parenthood. Hello and welcome to the Cybex Hot Mom Walk.

podcast. Today you are listening to me, Teresa Hudson from Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. I am one of the Cybex Hot Mom winners and today we'll be a little chit chat about how I became a mom. First off, I'd like to just give a little quick warning that there will be some talk of miscarriages, losses, as well as some birth trauma. So if you're not feeling that section or you don't want to listen to it, just skip ahead.

So yeah, my name is Teresa Hudson and my journey to become a mom is a pretty long one. I'm hoping to kind of explain it to you all. So if you've ever gone through something similar, you feel a little less alone. If you know someone going through these battles, maybe it gives you a little bit of insight into how they're feeling and how you might be able to help them. I had decided with my partner that we wanted to become parents, probably from our first date.

We waited obviously a little while, but when we did start trying to conceive, nothing happened. I wasn't sure why, but I had a gut feeling that something was wrong. I reached out to my family doctor and asked him at the time, you know, could I have some things tested? Just wondering why nothing's happened. It's been six months of trying. And at the time I was under the age of 35 and they say to wait a year before you really dive into why you might have infertility.

So he kinda just brushed me off, no big deal, keep on trying, you'll be pregnant in no time. I thought, okay, so I kept continuing to do all the things, using the ovulation strips, timing intercourse, eating all the proper foods, drinking all the teas, doing all the things, standing upside down, you name it, I tried it, nothing happened. Again, I went back to my family doctor who at the time had changed, my doctor retired, and my new family doctor had referred me to the fertility clinic.

here in Halifax. The initial assessment kind of came up that they didn't really know what was going on. My partner, his numbers looked great. My numbers looked okay. They were a little bit low, kind of a little bit of an insight into maybe that I had diminished ovarian reserve, which just means that I have less eggs in the tank.

I will be hitting menopause sooner than most women and the eggs that are left usually as you could become older, the quality often goes hand in hand, not always, but I did have less to begin with. So they thought, well, you don't have that many eggs each cycle. So maybe your option is IVF. It was a bit of a tough pill to swallow. I thought maybe we'd have some other options we could do first, time to intercourse with medication, maybe some IUI, which is interuterine insemination.

However, with my lower numbers, me being 34 at the time, getting close to that 35 mark, which is a big number in the infertility world, unfortunately, time is not on our side. It's not a definite thing, but they do try to get you going before that age. They said IVF, so we thought, okay, put our pennies together and see if we can save up for IVF, which is an extraordinary cost.

If you've ever gone through any sort of infertility treatment, it's not just the cost of the procedures, it's also the cost of the medication, which can double the cost. Anywhere from $10 ,000 to $20 ,000.

per cycle would be an average range across Canada. Majority of the provinces do not have coverage. There are some tax incentives in Nova Scotia now. When we were going through this, there was nothing. I do believe a few provinces have some better things going on and some provinces have worse going on. So no matter what, it's still a really costly journey. So we started that journey in March of 2020, which if you're thinking way back then, hold on, wait a minute, that was the hit of the lovely pandemic we all went through.

So it was even more interesting added on top of that. So my first round of IVF, for those of you who've never done IVF, maybe I'll just give a little bit of a blurb about what it is. What happens is every time that you have your cycle, your body is creating multiple eggs. So you have follicles inside each ovary and all of those follicles are growing and eggs inside of them. You might create 10, you might create 20.

Your body then ultimately picks the one that they think is the best. The ovaries is like, this egg looks great, grows that one to the full size. And then your body would release that egg, that egg would go down your fallopian tube and you'd either become pregnant or you would have your menstruation. So with IVF, what happens is they go in, they look at your follicles inside your ovaries and say, okay, you have about however many you might have. Let's get some drugs in there and pump all of them up. We're not going to let the body just choose one.

we're gonna choose to grow all of these follicles and see what sort of eggs we have in them. For someone like me who has a diminished ovarian reserve, so less eggs in the tank, each cycle I'd have between five to 10 eggs total between both sides of my ovaries. Some women might have upwards of 20 or 30 each time depending on what they're, you know, what's going on with their body. For example, polycystic ovarian syndrome, PCOS, many of you might have or have heard of.

often creates to multiple lots and lots and lots of follicles, lots of little follicles, but having a really hard time getting that one big follicle to grow and release. So, you know, different cycles could be really long, you might not have a period. So people through with PCOS would typically create a lot more eggs. So I went in for my IVF cycle. So we got our eggs growing, doing all the needles. You do about two or three needles a day to.

pump up those eggs and then at one point they decide we want to make sure that you're not going to ovulate. So you start another needle, they add another needle in and you're doing, you know, three or four needles a day to pump up those eggs, but not let them release. You're going in for monitoring scans, checking to see the growth of them, looking to see how far along they've been growing. They want to get them big enough that they are mature eggs. So that way they can be fertilized. So you're going back and forth to the clinic every couple of days, every day, depending on where you're at in your cycle.

And once they think that all of the eggs that they can get to grow are ready They will do something called a trigger shot which would be a shot to then say to your body It's time to release the eggs and approximately I think it's 36 hours after don't quote me on it Your doctor would know if you're going through this but a day or so after you go in and you have your IVF Which is your retrieval the process to grow these eggs can take anywhere from 7 to 14 sometimes even longer

depending on your body and how it's responding to the meds. So that's this kind of the start of IVF if you've never done it. If you've gone through it, you're probably like, yeah, I've been there and done that. But that's the start. Then you go in for your retrieval, which is an interesting one. So you go in for a surgery. It's a day surgery. What they do is they'll use in the internal ultrasound if you've ever used it. It's affectionately known as Wanda in the IVF community, the wand. We call her Wanda. She's lovely. She visits us often.

So they will insert Wanda with a very large long needle that goes into your ovaries where they take out the follicles from, sorry, the eggs from every follicle. They suck them out and as they're sucking them out, they count to see how many eggs that you're getting and the embryologist, the scientist will count them and kind of separate them into little Petri dishes. All's well in Canada, you are awake. You do have medication, of course, pain relief medication.

often doesn't work, didn't work for me, it was extremely painful, terrible process for me, but most people, there's not a whole lot of pain in the US and in some provinces, you can choose to be put under for this little surgery that you have. So you leave the clinic that day and they tell you, yay, we've received however many eggs. At that point, they'll take your eggs, they'll take your partner's sperm or donor's sperm and inseminate them.

They can either do natural where they like little swimmers, find which egg they wanna go in and have natural fertilization. Natural, I put in air quotes because as we know, all of this is natural. It's all from our bodies. It's just in a lab. Or they can do something called excess, which is where they select which swimmers they think are the best and they actually insert it with a little needle into each egg. We actually did excess just to ensure that every egg did get fertilized. And then you wait.

So you wait five, six or seven days after that surgery to see how many of these little guys are gonna survive. It is an extremely long wait. Those five to seven days are painfully long. You are waiting and hoping some clinics will give you updates. Yes, they've grown, they're growing, they're having cell division. If you can remember back to your high school biology classes, your mitosis meiosis, they're looking for cell division. They're looking for it to be growing at a rate that is...

you know, appropriate and normal for human fertilization. And then on day five, six or seven, you either go back to the clinic for a fresh transfer. So you've been prepping your body to get one of those embryos back into your body to see if you can get pregnant or you freeze them all and come back at a subsequent cycle some point down the road. That is my little brief blurb on what IVF is. Again, not a doctor. I'm a physical education teacher, but I've gone through a lot.

So yeah, so that's what we decided to do. Our first IVF cycle was in 2020. We went in five days after my retrieval to find out that from the 10 eggs that were taken from my body, none of them had turned into plasticists, which means none of them had made it far enough to be put back into me to have a viable pregnancy. To say I was devastated was an understatement.

Me and my partner cried. We cried a lot. Well, I cried a lot. I don't know if he cried, but he definitely, we felt hopeless. We had a tiny glimmer of hope in the fact that they said two of them had gotten to a moriola stage, which isn't great. There's supposed to be more cells, just anatomy lesson there for you, but they can put them in. The chances were of success really low.

We thought, well, we just spent however much money. Let's put them in. Let's see what happens. So we wiped away my tears. I went back down into the lab and they then put in the two Morialas into my uterus. Then I went home, kept taking my needles and my progesterone and all my supplements and all my things, eating my pineapple core, which is a, you know, an IVF superstition because it has rolamine in it. It's supposed to make your uterus really sticky.

doing all the things to see if it would work. We thought maybe, just maybe these two little almost embryos could grow and become a pregnancy. About seven days later, I started testing at home pregnancy tests. And for the first time ever, we had a positive pregnancy and I was flabbergasted. I was shocked. I was over the moon excited. I couldn't believe it.

This had never happened to us in the almost two years of trying prior to that. It was amazing. I was over the moon. And then about, I think it was day 13 or 14, I went in for my blood work at the clinic and it came back positive. It was low. So what they do is they look to see how much pregnancy hormone you have in your blood. Mine was low, but it was still positive. So they said, congratulations, here's your due date. Here's your next appointment, et cetera, et cetera.

It's like, okay, great. That's awesome. I'm so excited. my gosh, we're gonna have a baby. And then I started to have some bleeding. So I wasn't sure what was going on. I contacted the clinic. They didn't really know. They said it's very common. Bleeding in early pregnancy is super common. It really truly is. And often means nothing's wrong. But it felt like something was wrong. So I ended up going to the emergency room a couple of days later just to see what was happening. Again, this is all COVID time. So.

All of these things that I'm doing, unfortunately, I had to do alone. We weren't allowed having people with us, support people with us at the time. And I went in and they said, you know, everything looks fine. They tested my blood work again. The numbers had doubled, which is what's supposed to happen in a pregnancy, and sent me on my merry way. A couple of days later, I thought, I'm still bleeding. This still seems wrong. Went in and got my blood work, got another scan. They couldn't see anything internally. They said it's too early. Maybe they just have missed it at that point.

but to keep on trucking, things were gonna be fine. Again, I kept bleeding, I didn't know what was going on. At one point, the clinic then said, okay, you know what, you're at your six week mark in pregnancy. Come into the clinic, we'll give you an early ultrasound and we'll see what's happening in there. We'll just make sure that there is something in your uterus, it is growing and we'll go from there. I thought, okay, cool, amazing. Went into the clinic, had my scan alone while my partner sat.

in the parking lot, in the car, and he waited for me. And unfortunately, they found the baby in my tube. It was still hard to talk about. It was really sad. Sorry. They told me I had to go to the emergency room because I had an ectopic pregnancy. There is less than a 2 % chance that you have an ectopic pregnancy from IVF.

because they placed the embryo into your uterus. Unfortunately for me, it decided to travel into my tube. So I came downstairs and I had to tell my partner in the car what had happened. And we drove to the hospital. We got to the hospital and I had to go in alone and the security guard at the hospital, whoever this man is, if someone ever finds him, he was the security guard at the hospital.

let my partner come with me because I was so upset. And he and his wife had also had gone through an ectopic pregnancy and he could feel my pain. And he let my partner come in to support me, which I was so thankful for. What an amazing man. So we went in, the doctor told me I could have a shot, which should stop the pregnancy in my tube. And it should just slowly go away. That was kind of the end of it, or so we thought.

I had to get blood work to ensure that the pregnancy was leaving my body and the blood work actually showed that it wasn't, that it was still growing. After about a week -ish of seeing the numbers continually go up, they had told me to go back to the hospital and I kind of had two choices. I could get another shot to see if it would work this time or I could have surgery. The surgery was much more known. They knew the surgery would work so I went in about a week after that and had my tube removed.

I had one tube removed when I woke up from my surgery again alone because of the lovely time that we were in in 2020. They had told me that I had endometriosis. I had absolutely no idea. I have zero symptoms of endometriosis. And as most people know, endometriosis can be really, really, really painful, debilitating periods, pain, pain with intercourse, all kinds of different symptoms. And I had none of it.

So it was very shocking, but it also led to a little light bulb moment of, hmm, maybe that's why we're having all these issues trying to conceive on our own. They burned off some of the endometriosis while they were in there removing the tube, but they did say that it was around a stage one, which there are four stages, stage one is the lowest, but then I did have endo. So here we are, I have one tube, I have endometriosis, we have now had a miscarriage, and we have no embryos in the freezer, and we have to start all over again. So that's what we did.

We started taking our supplements, taking our, all the different pills we were supposed to be taking, me and my partner. Because again, it's 50 -50. Men also contribute to this, whether you have a partner or not, you need some good quality sperm to create a baby. And that's what we did. So we did another round of IVF. This time we ended up with two embryos, one we froze.

One, we put in me and one again, Moriola, one of those kind of almost they're not quite, we also put in me as a fresh transfer. That again, led to a pregnancy. Unfortunately, this time it was also a miscarriage. It was a chemical miscarriage, which means an early miscarriage. And I had passed that naturally. And then we were again with no baby, another, you know.

20 ,000 on top of the first 20 ,000 we spent and one embryo in the freezer. We were not expecting the journey to take this long. We are not expecting the journey to cost that much money. And we were not expecting the journey to be so hard emotionally. That's probably the hardest part of infertility and IVF is the emotional journey. I think if you ask any person who's ever gone through it, they will never say that it is, I mean, of course finances are important, but.

The shots, yeah, they're hard to give yourself a needle, but you do it. The hardest part is the mental loneliness that you have, the fear of never becoming a mom that you have. So we himned and hawed about what we wanted to do next. We thought about using donor eggs because we had seen that my eggs just hadn't been really given us much. But we thought, well, we still can't leave the country. We now can leave the province. Maybe let's try another clinic. So again,

pinched our pennies, saved up enough money, and we went to Toronto. We went to Toronto and did a retrieval. I thought, let's just try. Let's try something different. Also, by the way, I didn't mention in there, I had two canceled IVF cycles. One, because I had no response to drugs after seven days. None of my follicles were growing, so they canceled it. So that was a ton of money wasted for nothing. And one that got canceled because I had a cyst, which is super common, but it just wouldn't go away. So we had to wait, you know, however many months between all of those cycles before we could...

Jump back on the horse. So I went to Toronto for my third IVF retrieval. At this point, this was, we were throwing all our eggs into this basket, doing all the things I could do, acupuncture, massage, mindfulness, eating all the things, taking all the supplements, paying for the extra things at the clinic that they said could help. And we ended up with one embryo in the freezer in Toronto. So my eggs were done.

They just didn't want to make any embryos. We had one in the freezer here in Halifax. We had one in the freezer in Toronto. And we thought, okay, let's transfer one. We've never done a transfer with a frozen embryo. Let's see what happens. And we transferred the one in Halifax first because, well, it was here and it was a day five embryo, which is better than a day six is what we had in Toronto. And we transferred it in. And again, I got pregnant. I was not excited. I was scared. I was nervous.

Of course, there's always hope, even when you feel hopeless, you have a glimmer of hope in the back of your head that it just might be your time. And it kept growing. We went for our scans and it kept growing. I started vomiting and having pregnancy symptoms and I was so happy about feeling miserable because I was growing a human that I had made with the help of a lot of doctors and...

It kept going and going and we ended up having our baby, our little boy Clark. Clark was born in October of 22 and I can't even express in words how amazing it was to have a child. Not only did we go through a lot to get him, but I truly honestly felt like I was never going to become a mom.

I had thought about that. I know that that does happen to a lot of people. A lot of people are childless, not by choice. And that's their own stories to tell, if they even choose to tell it. But I really had started working on my own mental health about what our lives would look like if that happened. I also started to really think about donor, donor eggs, donor embryos, if that was an option for us. But our little boy Clark came along, our one in the freezer here in Halifax, he worked.

He is our little golden egg. Somehow he worked. And he's amazing. He's the best thing going. I can't even believe I have him. When Clark was about a year old, we decided to transfer our last embryo. We flew our embryo from Toronto to Halifax in a very expensive plane ride. And we put that last embryo in to see if we could give Clark a sibling. And it did not work. I did not become pregnant. Nothing happened. So Clark...

is our one. He is our one and done. I've also heard people say one and fun, which I think is way more fun. He's our baby. We will unfortunately have no siblings for him. Financially, we are tapped out. Emotionally, I'm tapped out. My eggs are done. And he is our baby. So we are very thankful to be one and done -ers. We're very thankful to have Clark, and that was our journey.

Some of you are probably like, holy moly, that was really long. It was long. Tell me about it. It took us years. It took us years and years and years to get Clark. But man man, we're thankful. From that entire story, kind of things that I thought people might like to hear or know from it is that you can always, always advocate for yourself. So if you are going through secondary infertility, you're trying to have another child or...

You know someone who's going through infertility or you've gone through IVF and you want to have another one and you have some embryos in the tank or you don't. Just be sure to advocate for yourself. Ask the questions. Put yourself out there. The squeaky wheel gets the oil. If you sit back and wait, a lot of the time with medical care, nothing will happen. Not always, but I definitely suggest advocating. The other thing too that helped me through this entire process...

Was finding my people. Find your people. Maybe you're going on Cybex's Hot Mom Walks with those people right now. Those people will support you as you try for your next child. Those people will support you as you work through all of this. But find your people. I found so much support on Instagram. It is unbelievable. I created a Instagram account, East Coast IVF Mom.

Originally it was just East Coast IVF. And I found people going through the exact same thing as me, whether it was in the United States, whether it was somewhere else in Canada. And honestly, so many of those women have become my good friends to this day. We still keep in contact. We still talk about our journeys. We still have moments where we feel sad or angry or upset. And they are my support. So find your support. The other thing I think to remember is you are not alone.

You are not alone in any of these struggles. You are not the only person going through it. It can feel like that in moments. It can feel like you are in no one's, you know, gone through it. And there are so many different stages of how hard this can be. And everybody's hard is hard. You're hard. It is hard. It sucks. It's the worst. Nobody wants to go through infertility. Nobody. And no matter.

what you've gone through, even if it was that you had to try for eight months and you got pregnant, but those eight months were a roller coaster for you, that's totally valid. That is hard. It's hard, that cycle of seeing that negative month after month after month turning into years. If you are going through any sort of those sort of struggles, it is really, really hard. I did want to say I wanted to talk about my...

labor and delivery, but you know what? I don't think there's even enough time for that. We've all got our struggles. We all had issues. During my postpartum, I will say that I had a lot of guilt when I was going through some of my struggles, especially around breastfeeding. I wasn't able to breastfeed. I was on multiple pills trying to get milk in and it never really happened for me. I had a colicky baby, cried a lot, screamed a lot for the first three months.

And it took me so long to get there that I felt guilty when I was frustrated. I felt guilty when I was sad. And I really had to just take a moment and step back and say, I'm allowed to be happy and sad at the same time. I'm allowed to be joyful and angry at the same time. So if at any point in your motherhood that you feel that way, where you're like, this kid's driving me crazy, but you love them to pieces.

It's so valid, like, we all have those moments. It's exactly how you should feel. Keep going for your walks. Keep talking to people and keep finding your crew. Find the people that will support you. Find the people that have been through what you've been through. Advocate for yourself. Advocate, advocate. I can't say it enough. Advocate for yourself on your journey to your family and what you want. And be flexible. Know that it may not happen when or how you want.

Be ready for changes, be prepared and yeah, be be kind to yourself. That's my number one thing. Be kind to yourself. So that was a long -winded rollercoaster story of kind of what IVF is, how I went through my journey to become a mom. If any of it spoke to you, if any of it gives you questions about your own journey, please shoot me a message on Instagram. I'm always there for anyone who needs support.

and also reach out to people in your local area. I'm sure that there's a support group, you just have to find one. If you know someone going through infertility or loss, the biggest thing that I can say is tell them that you are there for them, tell them that it sucks, and let them know you can listen. Don't give advice, don't give suggestions, don't tell them to just do something, just adopt, just do IVF, just...

not be a mom. Just take my kids because they're annoying. Don't say any of those things. Those are so hurtful and I know they come from a place of love, but just be there for them. Lend them your ear, buy them some ice cream, tell them it sucks, and be there for them. That's my advice. I hope you had a great Cybex Hot Mom Walk. I hope that this story was not only sad, but inspiring, that you know, little by little I got to being a mom.

and little by little you'll get to where you need to go as well. It may not look the way you thought it would, but in the end, I hope you all find your way. Hope you had a great Cybex Hot Mom Walk, and I hope that my story helped you or maybe make you feel a little less alone. Thanks so much for listening. Have a good one. Thanks for tuning in to the Cybex Hot Mom Walk podcast series. Follow the Cybex Spotify channel for more updates and for new episodes.