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

Today's guest encountered her own set of surprises in pregnancy and birth.   Because she gave birth almost two decades ago, she didn't have easy access to the overwhelming amount of information that's available now, we had kids before the iPhone was a thing and before the internet was the endless warehouse of information it is today, but she forged her path to parenthood, without im...

If you have the slightest bit of doubt about the complex chemistry needed to inspire an embryo to develop into a baby, a casual stroll around the details of IVF will quickly disabuse you of that notion. Today’s guest set out to get pregnant a few years after she’d turned 35 and pretty quickly turned to IVF.  Agreeing to IVF is agreeing to become a science project. Because she so deeply wanted chil...

Today's guest went into pregnancy without many expectations about what the process would be like. This openness likely helped her and her partner negotiate the challenging things she had to manage in delivery and the postpartum period.  After her first birth, the baby encountered an issue that landed her in the NICU, and a few days after her second delivery, my guest wrestled with some scary...

The challenges of pregnancy and birth can be useful mentors for future parents. Today’s guest learned something significant from each of her three birth experiences. The first taught her that she’d need an advocate in birth given that it’s such a powerful and vulnerable experience. The second taught her that trust could be restored in a situation when a real partnership was at work, and the third...

There are three reasons to tune into today’s episode: first, it is a chance to see pregnancy through the eyes of an OB who is both the emotional individual experiencing what we all experience when we try to grow our families, and someone endowed with much more experience and information than most of us. Second reason: when you hear the story of a fully trained OB, who has seen how pregnancies and...

Today's guest experienced both extremes of the spectrum when it came to creating a family: uncomplicated pregnancies that led up to more challenging births. She enjoyed an easy step into her first pregnancy and wrestled with infertility leading to her second. Both pregnancies were straightforward while both births, strayed from the script, injecting unwelcome drama. While labor more or less s...

Our ability to delay pregnancy through various forms of birth control may lead us all to have expectations about our ability to manage our own fertility. It’s one thing to stop pregnancy, and something altogether different to initiate it. Today’s guest, a fan of control like the rest of us, is a master planner.  She planned to get pregnant quickly, have an enjoyable pregnancy, and a routine birth....

Today’s guest stepped into her first pregnancy relatively easily,getting pregnant within a few months of trying…... and that was the last easy thing she experienced.  She describes herself as someone who is “not a pregnancy unicorn”.  She had body image issues while pregnant, felt nauseous, swollen and was generally physically uncomfortable for most of the pregnancy. And then postpartum recovery w...

Today’s guest is no stranger to hard labor. As a strength and training coach she’s seen how disciplined effort produces results. But long runs and weight lifting sets didn’t prepare her for some of the consequences that the complicated chemistry of pregnancy can produce. Through the course of her different pregnancies she tangled with HELLP syndrome--a pregnancy complication that requires emergenc...

It seems self evident that most doctors would agree that being the doctor and being the patient are two entirely different experiences. And being the patient as a doctor is a third, different path. Today’s guest is an OB, and got pregnant with her first daughter when she was still in residency. Unlike many guests, she probably knew too much about the world she was stepping into--which led her to h...

Like many women, today’s guest imagined that having a child would be straightforward–that’s the way she’d always seen it portrayed in the culture around her. And at the start, her expectation and experience lined up well. Getting pregnant wasn’t a challenge and being pregnant, was an exercise in smooth sailing for many months. But then the swelling hit, followed by an episode of fainting, and she...

Some women waltz easily into pregnancy and motherhood, at least in the Hollywood version of the story.  This was not the version today’s guest experienced. Getting pregnant and being pregnant was not as straightforward as she was led to believe. Recovering from her first trimester loss was challenging, but my guest and her partner persevered and her subsequent pregnancy went swimmingly. The next c...

Like all great adventures, pregnancy rarely goes as planned, especially for first time mothers. For today’s guest, the journey had all the hallmarks of a grand adventure: pure joy when she found out she was pregnant, the excitement of an impending birth, the physical challenges of a natural labor, and a real dose of anxiety, pain and fear in the aftermath of that birth when a serious hemorrhage be...

Every pregnancy is awash in chemicals--that’s how the magic happens, how we turn an egg and a sperm into another human being. But this chemistry can have other consequences, notably, peripartum depression. Peripartum depression, the condition formerly known as postpartum depression, has been renamed to reflect the fact that this form of depression can strike during a pregnancy, as well as after it...

The project of starting a family involves some elements that are totally under your control (when you start trying to get pregnant, the doctors or midwives or doulas you choose) and other elements that you expect to be uncertain: what the pregnancy is like or when the baby comes.  But for today’s guest, almost every element of the process carried uncertainty: when she was pregnant, if the pregnanc...

#004- 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 o...

-#001 This is an introduction to War Stories from the Womb, the why and what of the podcast. For more information, see: https://warstoriesfromthewomb.com/ This is a weekly show that highlights real pregnancy, birth & postpartum stories.

#002- Many women approach pregnancy, and especially the birth of their children, as a sacred moment, as something they’ve long contemplated before it arrives. And with these thoughts come expectations. Such was the case for my guest today. For all three of her children’s births, she’d imagined a natural birth, with both the pain and the sense of triumph that experience involves. But circumstance g...

002. 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 or...