Mmmm . . . Black Licorice

I started the fertility serum drops yesterday! After I woke up early Saturday morning to let Flynn out, I went back to bed and just drowsed, thinking about Inconceivable. I had stayed up late the previous night to finish reading it . . . I had to find out if all her hard work paid off! (It did.) :)

Julia included a few of the stories of other women as a kind of epilogue or appendix to her book, which I thought was very cool and very helpful. She began writing Inconceivable four years after the birth of her second child, and even though she was no longer trying to get pregnant, she went to local Resolve meetings in order to immerse herself once again in the journey away from infertility. The stories she includes at the end of her book are those of some of the women she met there. Reading Julia's story was encouraging; reading the other five stories just affirmed even more what I felt after reading Julia's story--that this is possible, this is something that is within my reach. What I loved was that each woman did what felt right to her: one woman saw a craniosacral therapist (I studied this a bit when I was doing massage therapy), one used specially blended herbal teas (but not Chinese herbs) and acupressure techniques; another woman created an affirmation to welcome her unborn child and to align her thoughts with what she wanted to bring into her life, while yet another woman saw a homeopath and used different remedies to get her body ready for pregnancy. All of these different women were drawn to different methods of healing--they were drawn to the methods that were right for them.

The stories I read reaffirmed what I said in an earlier post that infertility can be cured using natural methods--but that it can take awhile. The woman who drank the herbal teas did it faithfully for two years before she got pregnant and I think it was at least a year for Julia as well. She had a high FSH level (which basically meant that her body was beginning to go into menopause) and she explored just about every natural option she could find to help lower it. She started with an FSH level of 42 and ended with an FSH level of 21.4. She did this using yoga, completely changing over to a vegetarian diet, doing colonics, drinking wheatgrass every day, using Chinese herbs and acupuncture, reading books on thinking positively (Dr. Dyer!), doing twice-daily visualizations of her pituitary gland secreting the correct amount of FSH and of her egg becoming fertilized by her husband's sperm and implanting in her uterus. She did all of this as well as working part-time and being a mom to her toddler.

Saturday morning I felt uplifted, inspired, motivated and encouraged. As I drowsed in bed, I closed my eyes and did a short visualization that I modeled after one Julia had used in which she pictured herself hiking up a steep mountain trail. At various places along the trail were women she loved. They were waiting for her with gifts for her baby. The gifts were things like love, courage, wisdom, trust and peace. Some of the women had already passed on from this life, but they were there every day, waiting for her as she hiked the trail in her mind. Powerful, powerful stuff. When I opened my eyes again I knew that that was the day to start the fertility serum. It just felt right.

So far I really like the drops: they don't leave me feeling overly greasy, as I thought they might, and I smell of black licorice, but not too strongly. And I like that the drops are something tangible I can do every day to remind me that I am helping myself instead of just waiting and hoping. I am acting!