The labs we run when IVF doesn't work

In today’s episode, I’m sharing the story of one of our clients who came to us after nearly 2 years of infertility, a missed miscarriage, 3 failed IUIs, and an unsuccessful attempt at starting IVF because her body simply wasn’t responding to stimulation medications the way it should.

After being told IVF was essentially her only option, she felt stuck. Like she had reached the end of the road. If IVF wasn't working....what would?!

But once we ran a deeper, more comprehensive look at her foundational health, we uncovered several major patterns that had never been addressed:

• Significant insulin resistance and metabolic dysfunction
• High systemic inflammation
• Mineral depletion from chronic stress
• Nutrient deficiencies impacting ovarian function and implantation
• Gut and foundational health issues affecting overall fertility resilience

In this episode, I walk you through:

• Why “normal labs” often miss major fertility roadblocks
• The connection between insulin resistance and ovarian response
• How inflammation can interfere with implantation and egg quality
• Why foundational health matters for both natural conception and IVF outcomes
• The exact areas we focused on in her personalized treatment plan

And most importantly… I share the incredible update she gave me after implementing her protocol for just one month:
Her body is now responding appropriately to IVF stimulation meds. This means IVF is now a viable option, and she once again has hope that having a child is possible for her.

This episode is for anyone who feels like they’ve run out of options, feels defeated after failed fertility treatments, or has been told to just “keep trying.”

There is always a reason the body is struggling.
And there are often answers that haven’t been uncovered yet.

If you’d like support from our team, you can schedule a consultation call directly with me through the link below.

Click HERE to apply to work with us (first step is that consultation call with me to make a game plan).

Transcript

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Today, I want to tell you the story of one of our clients who came to us after just under two years of trying to get pregnant. And within that time, she experienced a missed miscarriage that led to a DNC, followed by three failed IUIs, followed by a mock attempt at stimming for an IVF cycle that was ultimately unsuccessful because her body didn't respond appropriately to the hormones and STEM meds that were used. So she had felt like by this point in her story, she was at a dead end. It was kind of like I either keep trying what's not working, or she didn't really feel like she had another option. But that was until she found us. Now she knows that she has another option, and we've been able to, spoiler alert, give her a lot of answers. And she today shared with me that she at the time of this recording today shared with me that after starting to implement the treatment plan that we put together for her, she is actually responding to hormones and STEM meds as she should be. So this is a major win, and that's a spoiler for kind of where we're headed with this episode. But I want to give you a little bit of backstory on who we are before I get into that, in case you are new to us. So if this is your first time listening to the podcast, if you're new to our world, we spend our days helping women get and stay pregnant after being told that they have unexplained infertility, or after they've been told that their labs are normal and to just keep trying, or after they've been told that they'll need to have three miscarriages before doing any testing, or who have been told IVF is their only option, or who have already tried IUI or IVF unsuccessfully. I could go on and on here, but to sum it up, essentially what we do is find answers that no other practitioner has been able to find to help women and couples get results that they up until this point haven't been able to get, which of course, ultimately that result is to get and stay pregnant and have a healthy baby in their arms. I'm so glad that you are here listening today because what we do is really unique. And I want you to be able to kind of get a look behind the curtain before you ever would decide to jump in and work with us. And so that's why I'm sharing, you know, this client story to give you an idea of who we are, what we do, how we help, you know, in cases that may be just like yours. So I'm gonna share a little bit of backstory about this client, dive into the labs that we ran and what her results told us about her body, and then how we built out a personalized treatment plan that ultimately is beginning to help her restore her fertility to a place where we know that she will eventually be able to successfully carry a pregnancy. Beyond that, though, it's also a story of hope that getting and staying pregnant is possible, no matter what kind of misguided advice or recommendations you've gotten from your doctor or other practitioners. So let's get into it. As I mentioned, this client has been trying for about two years. Her and her partner have been trying to get pregnant for just about two years. She is, at the time of this recording, 33 years old. She's been through the gamut, she's gone through pregnancy loss, she's had a DNC, she's tried IUI, she's attempted to try IVF unsuccessfully because her body did not respond as it should. And she was already really trying everything that she thought she was supposed to try. She was taking a prenatal, she was following the recommendations of her doctor, she went to see a reproductive endocrinologist, she did everything by the book, and it didn't work out the way that she had hoped. So thankfully, she found her way to us. When your foundational health is in a place of robust function and resilience, that is when optimal fertility is just a natural byproduct. So we look to when fertility outcomes, you know, aren't unfolding the way that we would hope, when we're not getting pregnant as easily as we would have expected, we look to those foundational factors and how they could be contributing. And when I say foundational factors, I mean things like are we digesting and absorbing nutrients well? Is our thyroid functioning well? Are we clearing excess hormones via detox pathways in our gut and via our stool well? Are we getting the deep restful sleep that's required in order to produce hormones optimally? Are we, do we have a nervous system that is constantly being exposed to a high level of stress that would not be conducive to fertility? And on and on and on. We take a really deep look at nutrient status because if you don't have the resources that your body requires to grow a human, you won't be able to grow a human. We look at how the immune system is responding because that plays a big role in whether or not an embryo will be able to successfully implant and be sustained. We look at inflammation, systemic inflammation in the body. We look for are there higher than ideal levels of inflammation that would create a problematic environment for growing high-quality eggs, for implanting an embryo successfully, et cetera, et cetera. We look at also not only is that inflammation present, but also where is it coming from? Is it related to blood sugar and metabolic issues? Is it related to an autoimmune thyroid issue? Is it related to a gut infection or a microbiome imbalance? The list goes on. So suffice it to say, we dig deep and we leave no stone unturned and we look at all aspects of foundational health that can contribute to fertility. So that's kind of the gist on the labs that we run. Let's talk about what we found with this particular client when we ran her labs. So, as I mentioned, one of the factors we look at is blood sugar and metabolic health. There's a big correlation between metabolic health and both ovulation quality, egg quality, inflammation in the uterine lining, inflammation in the body as a whole. So when we see blood sugar issues, we know that that's a big red flag for fertility. And in this case, that was one of the biggest patterns that we saw. We saw blood glucose was elevated, we saw the hemoglobin A1C was elevated, we saw insulin was significantly elevated, leptin was significantly elevated, triglycerides are significantly elevated. All of these suggest that insulin resistance is a huge player in this client's foundational health issues that are thereby blocking her ability to get and stay pregnant. Maybe you know this, maybe you don't, but when metabolic issues, insulin resistance, blood sugar regulation, when any of that is going wrong, it is one, a high factor in just systemic inflammation. It's a very inflammatory condition. When blood sugar is spiking and dropping and spiking and dropping, that is a stressor to the body and an inflammatory factor on the body. Beyond that, when insulin resistance starts to rear its head, when we see that the body isn't responding to insulin appropriately, that can mess with communication between the brain and the ovaries, and as I kind of already mentioned, cause problems for the timing and the quality of ovulation, as well as ovarian response to stimulation, which we know is a factor for this client. We know that she and when they did that, her ovaries did not respond. The eggs did not, or the follicles did not develop as they should. And so we can see a clear connection here between, okay, we found issues with blood sugar regulation, with insulin resistance, and we know that that can cause issues with ovarian response to stimulation, whether that be natural stimulation or exogenous stimulation with hormones and stem meds. So right there, right off the bat, we have a little bit of a slam dunk. But that wasn't the only thing we found. We also found that her inflammatory markers were high. So there's a marker called CRP that is a measure of systemic inflammation in the body, and that was elevated. And ESR is another measure of inflammation in the body that was significantly elevated as well. So this builds off of what we found with her insulin resistance pattern and tells us there's a significant inflammatory burden in this body, and that can interfere with implantation, with uterine receptivity, meaning how receptive is the uterine lining to an embryo that's attempting to be implanted, right? So those three failed IUIs, could that be a factor? It certainly could. Inflammation can also pose a problem for ovarian function and egg quality, and again, ovarian response to stimulation. So another kind of tally in that box of these are foundational functional terrain issues that one are significant and highly problematic for fertility, but two, these are things that her IVF clinic did not catch and would not ever catch. And arguably, these are things that going through round after round of IUI and IVF would potentially make worse for various reasons. There were a handful of other factors that we identified with her labs that were red flags as well. Her iron status was a little bit dysregulated. She didn't have quite enough serum iron, iron floating around in her bloodstream. And that iron is a crucial nutrient for follicle development, uterine lining growth, implantation. So again, we're looking at this issue of a body that's not responding well to the exogenous stimulation from hormones and meds. So really, this is yet another tally in that column of why that could be happening. We also identified that the stress, the long-term stress that she had been under, aka nearly two years of trying to get pregnant unsuccessfully, had drained her mineral stores. We need minerals for so many functions in the body, from blood sugar regulation to mitigating inflammation, to keeping the nervous system regulated and mitigating the effects of stress to sleeping well, to pooping regularly, and on and on and on. So again, this is something where foundational dysfunction can contribute indirectly, but also kind of directly to are we able to get and stay pregnant or are we not? So our top priorities with this client moving forward were to improve insulin sensitivity as a foundation for better ovarian response, to rebuild her minerals and other nutrients that we found that were depleted, because a body that's under stress and a body that's chronically depleted is not a body that is well set up to get and stay pregnant. So we moved into the first phase of her personalized treatment plan that was very heavily focused on metabolic support, mineral support, and setting a strong foundation within the gut, which there's nothing more foundational to fertility than a healthy gut, because if we are not able to digest and absorb nutrients well, we won't have the resources required to get and stay pregnant. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. That is absolutely foundational. So that was our focus with the first phase of this client's protocol. And she has now been implementing that protocol to the best of her ability for about a month. Simultaneously, she was preparing to move into another sort of mock trial for an IVF cycle. And the goal here was to see would her body respond differently than it had previously. And amazingly, much to her surprise and excitement, her body is responding appropriately to STEM meds this time as she's doing this mock trial for IVF. So essentially what's happening is restoring foundational function, improving metabolic flexibility, supporting minerals, supporting nutrients, supporting the gut, all of these really foundational puzzle pieces are having a direct impact on her body's receptivity to the hormones and STEM meds that she's taking to prepare her for her next round of IVF. Or I should say her actual first round of IVF, because previously her attempts to even get this far were unsuccessful because her body was not responding. And when she was telling me about all of this progress, improvement, these wins, she said something that I don't think I will ever forget. She's like, it's been so long since I've cried about something positive. It feels so good to be crying about a win instead of crying about literally a pregnancy loss or another failed attempt at trying to get pregnant. And I'll be honest, I almost cried right along with her. My second trimester pregnancy hormones are kicking in big time. So I am thrilled for her. And I just couldn't, I couldn't not share her story because I know that there's someone else out there who needs to hear this story because they're in the same place that she was a month, two months ago, where nothing was working, no other options were being presented other than keep trying what's not working. And if her story can bring you hope, then I've done my job. If you're listening to this thinking, I really feel like this kind of support is just what I need, you can find a link in the show notes to schedule a call directly with me, Katria, the head of the Connected Healing team, so that we can virtually meet and discuss your case in depth and figure out the best path forward for you. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.