In her late teens, Catie VanDamme was diagnosed with endometriosis, which is a disease that can make it more difficult for a woman to successfully conceive.
At 29 years old, after she got married and before she and her husband had started trying for a baby, she decided to go talk to a provider, who ran some blood work.
The doctor explained that her hormone levels, which dictate “how many eggs you could have or will have,” were low.
“It was used as a scare tactic,” she tells Stuckey. “The doctor that I signed up to see just took me on this path of, ‘Well, this is a really huge issue that your numbers are low,’ and really, it was the sense of ‘You needed to start IVF a couple of years ago’ type.”
VanDamme describes the feeling she had sitting in that office as a “gut punch.”
“What was most jarring to me was the push towards making embryos right away. It was like I went in for blood work and all of a sudden I was supposed to be scheduling appointments to come back to start the process,” she continues.
Despite the doctor’s insistence on beginning the IVF process immediately, VanDamme began to question the morality of putting human embryos on ice and whether or not there were other interventions possible to help her production of the necessary hormones, and she decided to get more opinions.
“We went to a third doctor,” she tells Stuckey. “And that was probably the most jarring experience.”
“It was, again, the same story of, ‘Okay, your blood work is kind of iffy, you should have started IVF a long time ago, but are you sure you even want to go through with this?’” she explains, telling Stuckey that the doctor then told her couples spend thousands for babies who die or are born with birth defects.
He also asked her if she was sure she even wanted to be a mom, said that he himself had “a really annoying niece,” and said that she could travel with her husband instead.
“It felt like I was sitting across from death,” she says. “I think he has seen so much carnage of what he has done at the sake of making money and playing God.”
However, despite the incessant fearmongering, VanDamme went to see a doctor who specialized in NaPro Technology — and was pregnant a month later.
“I worked with a provider to chart my own cycle, and it was done through something called the Creighton method,” she tells Stuckey. “He did something as simple as doing a follicle scan with me for a couple cycles and found out that I just wasn’t ovulating correctly. My hormones were out of whack.”
“All he did was put me on some progesterone medication. It was $4 with my insurance,” she explains. “He told me to go on a paleo diet and take a couple of these different medications that help with ovulation, and we’ll continue to see what happens.”
“And in like two months, I was pregnant,” she adds.
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