What You Didn't Expect in Fertility, Pregnancy & Birth: Real Stories & Expert Insights

Many people enter the long road to parenthood stuffed with different stories about what the process will be like: how long it will take to get pregnant, what growing another human inside your body will feel like, how the birth will unfold. And these stories come from everywhere: your childhood, family experiences, books, and media...today's guest originally thought she wouldn't have chil...

Pregnancy can invite a million different kinds of challenges. For some women, it's a physical trial. There are real limits on what our bodies can do. It certainly was for me for some all the massive changes that happen internally and externally can cause distress. And for some women, like today's guest, part of the challenge is how pregnancy can affect relationships. She had lots of chal...

If there’s one thing I can relate to directly, it’s the story of a high risk pregnancy.  But the pregnancy that my guest encountered was something I have no first hand knowledge of: she ran into an issue that threatened a premature birth, which caused her doctor to prescribe bedrest–for five months, 150 days for anyone who is counting–of being horizontal, she was more or less plucked out of normal...

Today's guest stepped into pregnancy relatively easily, and while she had some pretty common early challenges--extreme fatigue, congestion, and sensitivity to smell (her husband called her a blood hound--which feels like high praise in the right context... ).  The challenges really picked up at the birth, which was visited by a hemorrhage after a vaginal delivery and a bad reaction to morphin...

#003- Today’s guest approached pregnancy, and the motherhood that would follow, like a competition--one that she could excel at and ultimately win. And her first pregnancy, while not seamless, was relatively straight forward, giving credence to her early ideas about the process. But these beliefs lost steam when she had trouble getting pregnant the second time, and were fully deflated when ten wee...

In this episode we feature the story of a young woman who pursued pregnancy in a country different from her own, where language barriers and a different approach to care contributed to what became her life threatening condition. Originally told that she was not pregnant, she learns, many weeks later she has an ectopic pregnancy–but not your garden variety ectopic pregnancy.  Thanks to her organize...

Here we are at the end of 2021 and you may be feeling nostalgic for easier times, pre pandemic life…we visit these times in today’s story. my guest gave birth for the first time more than two decades ago and had a wide breadth of experiences in pregnancy and delivery in the course of her four pregnancies. She has hyper emesis for all of the pregnancies and learns to manage it despite her busy OB p...

Every person has their superpower. Yours could be patience or wit or strength. I am guessing that among the things that today’s guest could list as her super power, toughness and or stamina are probably near the top of the list. She contends with a fair amount of uncertainty about elemental issues, like the timing of both pregnancies, and then manages a stack of challenges beginning with birthing...

Having spoken with a lot of women about their experiences with reproduction, many of them report having one or possibly two issues that visit their pregnancy or birth that alert them to the fact that they have very little control over the momentous task of creating another person in the confines of their body. Today’s guest was visited by many, many issues, including miscarriage, hyperemesis, gest...

Since it's Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to make this episode about family. And in that spirit, I interviewed my mother about her experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. My mother, who is in her late 70s,  had four kids starting in 1966, and ending in 1978. You’ll hear her reference my two older brothers: Josh who is the first born, and Teddy who is the second. I was the third in line, and...

Lots of different inputs go into the project of starting a family; for many of us this includes a host of doctors: fertility doctors and OBs and anesthesiologists...and for today’s guest that list is even longer, extended to include pain doctors and ER doctors and neurologists because she had a stroke after her delivery.  Some of the doctors who participated in her project did so because the sympt...

Today I'm lucky to be talking to a midwife about her experience with her own twin pregnancy. The process of getting pregnant and giving birth did not look at all as she had planned, despite the fact that she had a lot of real information on which to base her prediction. Although she didn’t have the specific birth she originally envisioned, she successfully carried twins to term, and gained pe...

We all come to pregnancy and birth with ideas about what these transformative events will be like. Some ideas come from our own family experience and some from broader cultural influences. But discussions around the more challenging details of these experiences rarely get articulated, leaving a space for our own imagination to conjure pretty much whatever it wants.  And this expectation will be ma...

Today’s guest walked into pregnancy with reservations. She’d done a fair amount of research, as is her way, and understood that pregnancy, birth and postpartum were potentially a more difficult undertaking than movie depictions suggested.  Despite her avid preparation, she was, like most of us, taken by surprise.  She had to manage a hemorrhage during a miscarriage, and a birth experience that bot...

Today’s guest had to reexamine her expectations at various points in the process of growing her family. She enjoyed a relatively straightforward pregnancy, but had real fears of what the birth would be like.   Importantly, both births were totally successful, but they didn’t necessarily progress the way she imagined they would. The real challenge for her came after the birth: in the fourth trimest...

Today’s guest used to be a bodybuilder and is now a trainer and the owner of a fitness center and the mother of two kids. I think she’d describe herself as a woman who likes a challenge, and that’s probably a good way to step into the role of becoming someone’s mother. Different circumstances required her to overcome challenges presented at each step of this process--she originally had trouble get...

Getting pregnant, being pregnant and giving birth can be challenging in a myriad of different ways. But for some people, this massive transformation is….fairly straightforward. I totally enjoy talking to people who had a relatively smooth experience because it proves that the ideas many of us come to pregnancy with are not mythic, they do in fact live in the world ...And sometimes these lucky soul...

Everyone faces some kind of challenge in the process of becoming a parent. Today's guest took an unanticipated tour of possible approaches to labor and delivery. Once contractions were confirmed she arrived at the hospital to find her midwife busy with another birthing mother. So in the first half of her birth she was attended to by an OB, and the second half was overseen by a midwife, with v...

Both of my pregnancies taught me that just because some process is going on in the confines of your body, location does not imply control. This is also true for my guest today.  To some degree, I think that if her timeline didn’t unfold in the very specific way it did, she would not have ended up where she did--the mother of two healthy girls. On the way to this outcome, she experiences both the b...

Talking to my mother and other women from previous generations it sounds like they got pregnant and gave birth in a culture that's different from the one we face today. Based on these talks, I have often wondered how we got to the specific point we are at: where pregnancy is a very medical experience, C sections are so common,  we seem to be just starting to talk more openly about miscarriage...

Today's guest sailed pretty smoothly through the process of starting a family--she got pregnant relatively easily, carried her pregnancy without too many hiccups and gave birth in a way that wasn't too far from her expectation--and then she hit a breastfeeding wall, which likely contributed to her experience with post partum depression.  Now she's focused on helping women build a be...

 This episode could be titled "Overcoming: a guide".  My guest overcame the challenges of premature birth, and a fourth degree tear, and a misdiagnosis, and a fistula and a stoma. Having had so many elements of her life overturned by her experience of birth, she was reborn in a way, as a complete badass tackling every physical thing that previously induced fear in her. She's challen...

If you look at birth over time, it used to be the case that women were always attended at their births by other women, and sometimes midwives, and these births happened at home. In the 1930s american women moved those births into hospitals, in part to pursue effective pain relief and the allure of more safety--but for a good decade it was not actually safer to have births in hospitals. And over th...

In this episode, my guest tells her own story of pregnancy and she shares her experience of being a surrogate for another family.  It is, as you can imagine, a very involved process in part because it involves IVF, which always sounds to me like a full time job. Despite the fact that the pregnancies were relatively straightforward, there are challenges along the way, like postpartum depression, wh...

If I had to use one word to describe today’s guest i’d say driven, or maybe fierce--truly, and maybe it’s because of these personal attributes that her life in the world doesn’t match the predictions you might make if you looked at her health status on paper. She was born with a neurodegenerative disease that dramatically affected her mobility--she’s never walked and has been wheelchair bound for...