What frustrated me was I thought I was already living a moderate to healthy life. Heck, I associate with the Healthy Living Blogger niche. I know my PB's, avocado, oatmeal, and protein powders better than the average person, right? I work out, I use a lot of non toxic products, and I'm just conscious in general of things I'm eating, doing, and trying to be pretty healthy. I am sometimes guilty of choosing less healthy options (hey, I like my ice cream and cupcakes!), but I'm okay with that, because I think that healthy living means everything in moderation, but choosing the healthy options more often, which is what I was doing.
One thing I became more anal about was buying Organic. I'm not perfect and sometimes the option isn't there for what I'm looking for in my local stores, but if both the Organic and regular option exist, I tried to buy the Organic.
I also quit caffeine. I hadn't been drinking much in the past year anyway, and it wasn't a big deal to me to stop drinking coffee, tea, and caffeinated soda, just in case. I switched to water, juice and a few other decaf beverages. I've pretty much avoided decaf coffee too, because I've heard the caffeine is replaced by other chemicals and I wasn't too crazy about that idea (although this week I did have a decaf mocha coconut frapaccino and it was awesome).
The other thing I did right away after the second miscarriage was to buy some vitamins that are supposed to help with fertility issues, specifically the issue we thought I might have, which was egg quality.
I know a lot of people advise against spending too much time online doing research, but I felt so helpless I just wanted to be doing something that might help us conceive a healthy baby. Through the forums on Baby Center, I learned about taking CoQ10 and Royal Jelly, which are thought to help egg quality. I also kept taking the prenatals and added Baby aspirin at the advice of my doctor. Plus B-12 and B-6. I don't know if any of it helped, but I was taking all of them for almost exactly 3 months before I successfully got pregnant, which is the length of time it's thought you need to be taking them for them to take effect.
I'd also already been converting my beauty and cleaning supplies to more natural options, but went even further with that. I actually use quite a bit of hair spray on my fine, fly-away hair and after hunting through Earth Fare, I found a less toxic hair spray option that I really like. It doesn't leave me breathing in a cloud of smelly toxic stuff.
The other thing was that the month I conceived, I really thought about TTC a lot less than I had in a while. I felt like I had a good hiatus from TTC for the few months after the miscarriage in March. I ran more, drank more beer if I felt like it, I focused on me, and just kind of did what I wanted, not thinking that we really had much of a chance of conceiving that month. I knew the next month was the month we'd planned to start treatment and that month would be different, but May was kind of my do-what-I-want-and-not-think-much-about-TTC month. I think taking the pressure off myself helped. As I mentioned before, I didn't really know when I ovulated or focus that much on it when we "tried". It may have been my least obsessive month in the last year and half of trying.
I also think it helped that I went to the RE. Even though I never actually received drug treatment, the tests that they ran gave me piece of mind that there wasn't something inherently wrong that was causing our problems. I had heard that the HSG dye test makes people fertile by cleaning them out, and this may have been the case for me since I had one right before we conceived. I also liked that the responsibility became shared with the doctors and nurses there, that also took a lot of pressure of it all being on me. I liked that from early in the pregnancy they had an immediate game plan of putting me on progesterone, administering Beta HCG tests to check the progress of the pregnancy, and early ultrasounds. I just felt more comfort knowing they knew how to handle a person with a high risk pregnancy and had certain protocol, whereas in the past, I didn't feel like my OB office really handled my kind of situation that well.
I know my husband still believes that it's all just a crap-shoot. He was never that keen on me visiting the RE and thought all along that it was just a numbers game, that eventually we'd have a healthy pregnancy if we just kept trying. He may be right, but if one of the things I did made the difference this time, I'm glad I did it.
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