-When I first got all these tests done,
I couldn't really understand how to hear much beyond low.
And I wanted to talk to you about that.
-Just because these tests don't look perfect
does not necessarily mean that you have infertility
or will have infertility.
Most women 29 years old try to have a baby
and have no problems having a baby.
Only about 15% of couples actually have infertility.
So this is a little bit of an artificial process
that we're testing things in someone
who doesn't even have a fertility problem,
but we use these tests to really give us an idea
of how many eggs we'll be likely to get through the stimulation.
-Okay, so they're really intended to tell you
not about your fertility, per se,
but about the likelihood of egg freezing
or an IVF cycle working for you and nothing beyond that?
-Exactly.
And more importantly, sometimes we do these tests
and we find low numbers.
It may tell me that in order to get 10 or 20 or 30 eggs frozen,
we may need to go through more than one cycle
of ovarian stimulation, egg retrieval,
in order to get as many eggs as we want.
And that can be expensive and time consuming,
so I think it's important to know that at the get-go.
-It's impossible to test my fertility, basically?
-The only way to know you can actually have a baby
is to try to get pregnant.
-Okay.
All right.
Well, I don't know if I'm gonna do that tomorrow,
but I appreciate the advice.
-You're welcome.
-Getting a second opinion helped me put things into perspective.
But I also heard from viewers like you about your experiences.
That's how I met Deborah and her husband Jake.
They're a young couple with an unimaginable story.
-We wanted to have kids, but I think the way
we always thought about it was "eventually."
-Definitely post-35 for sure. -And, so, Deb,
you wanted to know a little bit more about your fertility.
Can you tell me about that?
-So, when I was in high school,
I had had a really large ruptured ovarian cyst.
So in the back of my mind, I kept thinking
I would feel really terribly
if I wanted a bunch of years to have kids,
I'm already with my life partner,
and then something in those years
happened that foreclosed that option for me.
And, so, as a result, I went to a fertility doctor
and was kind of thinking,
"Maybe I should freeze my eggs or we should freeze embryos
or something so that I can preserve fertility."
-Deborah got the same three standard tests that I had done,
and her results weren't too different from mine.
-She immediately was pretty concerned.
She said, "Your AMH is very low for 26,
but let's try to get you on an IVF stimulation cycle."
And during that first round,
they basically were not able to get any eggs from me.
And that was a really scary moment.
She kind of looked at me and said,
"I think you're going into early menopause at 26,"
and I was not prepared.
-Deborah and Jake tried again at the same clinic,
but their results weren't much better.
And they started to question whether or not their doctors
really knew what they were doing.
-We would go in and get scans
and see different doctors on different days
and get just completely
conflicting, opposite information.
And at that point, we were like, "We don't know up from down.
We have to go find something else."
-So, from here, you went to another clinic,
and what was that experience like?
-By almost any metric,
it probably went equally as bad, if not worse.
-You know, we continued to see the same type
of systemic disorganization,
and we went through that cycle.
And then we again got the same results in San Francisco,
and we were feeling pretty devastated.
-Deborah and Jake started this process to buy time
and wait on having kids, like me.
But after three failed cycles and constantly hearing doctors
speculate about infertility,
they decided to try naturally, and it worked.
Deborah got pregnant with twins,
but a few months in, she miscarried -- twice.
Their doctor's response left them disheartened and again
doubting whether or not he really knew
what he was talking about.
-He said, "You're gonna go have 10 more miscarriages,
and then you're gonna come back here."
-Yeah.
-Did he give you a reason for the miscarriages?
-No, and so that's what -- I kept on the call
trying to press him about,
"How does that correlate to when I try naturally?"
And I wasn't able to get good answers to that.
-At that point, Deborah and I
started to push up our sleeves
and started to really do our homework,
really investigate, find out what other doctors did.
-We kind of decided to really nerd out,
and we built a survey that we put on the Internet
and asked all of our friends
who had seen a fertility doctor to take.
And that was kind of what we used to find our third doctor.
We ended up actually conceiving naturally the month
that we were starting our IVF cycle with that doctor.
-You know, for that nine-month period when we found out
we were pregnant up until when we delivered,
you know, we didn't name the baby,
we didn't want to learn the sex, we didn't buy baby toys.
I mean, it was a "prove it" situation.
-Did it work out? [Baby fussing]
-There he goes. -Ta-da!
Right on cue.
-We might need, like, five minutes.
-Is that cool?
-Deal. -Guy's name's Lazer,
and the name in Yiddish means "with God's help."
-I want one. I want one.
Uh. -Ta-da!
-I think still we look at him two years later almost,
and we're like, "I can't believe you're here.
You're perfect.
We love you so much."
Had our second child three weeks ago.
-Also naturally? -Also naturally conceived.
-Aw, I see that little smile.
-I cannot imagine life without them at all.
-Who's this? Who is that?
-Who is this, Lazer?
-Say, your baby sister.
-Toes. -Where's the baby's feet?
-It's sort of, I think, reinjected a sense of wonder
back into our lives,
and, yeah, it's just been astonishing.
-The survey that we originally used to kind of find
our own doctor, we kind of realized,
like, hey, this is actually information that, like,
would be really helpful to a lot of people.
And we used that to launch what's now FertilityIQ.
You don't have a lot of access to your doctor
when you're going through fertility treatments.
Like, you might only see your doctor for 15 minutes
ever through a whole several-month process.
And, so, there's not a real chance to understand
holistically which decision you should be making.
So we wanted to give people more context
and really provide both sides
of every decision and flesh out data
so that people could make truly, like, informed decisions,
whatever decision they make.
Do you want to go to sleep?
-We look at Lazer and at Yara every day,
and we're completely in awe.
And to be able to help people get a step closer
to that means so much to both of us.
-I went and got my ovarian reserve tests myself at 29,
and it was a really scary experience.
And I'm curious what advice you guys have.
-I think the level of alarm that they raised in my
about my natural fertility was unwarranted.
Like, there's just not data to support that.
You hear from the fertility doctors,
"Oh, you have a low AMH.
That means you should freeze your eggs."
But in some senses, I feel like maybe it's the opposite.
It's like the people who have a higher AMH
might be a better candidate for egg freezing
'cause they can probably do one cycle,
feel good about the results, and move on.
Whereas there's a more nuanced calculation
that you have to make about,
"Do I want to do one cycle, do I want to do two, three cycles?
Like, how much am I willing to put myself through?"
-Getting Deborah's advice and hearing her story
helped me realize that while I may have instinctively
wanted to rush in to fertility preservation,
getting a second opinion is really insightful.
Dr. Gracia's perspective
on my results
was completely different from Dr.
Devine's,
and both are a reminder that we really are our best advocates.
Doing the research ourselves can be the most
empowering decision within our control.
So, in the next episode,
we'll talk all about the egg-freezing process,
but in the meantime,
tell me what your experience has been like.
Have you had these tests done before?
What were your results?
And how did they make you feel?
Comment below -- Share it, tweet it, get at me.
Coming up in episode five, have you ever wondered
what does egg freezing look
like?