How getting pregnant birthed a podcast
EDUCATION: Making my content as part of the infertility community has made me so aware of how fortunate we were to only need one round of treatment. That said, our journey was still incredibly daunting for us, especially for my husband when we discovered our infertility was male factor. On December 23rd, 2013 we were told we needed to have treatment. Christmas was ruined, as you can imagine. We spent a lot of it in tears, hiding away from family so we didn’t have to talk about it. On New Year’s Eve, though, privately, we raised a glass to ‘the process’ we had to follow.
My husband and I dealt with the stresses very differently. I told my family, he didn’t tell his. I told my best friend, my husband didn’t. He felt he only had me to talk to because men can find it hard to talk at the best of times, but this was one of our worst times. Once we knew the path we were on, we worked through it together. But it was hard. Our relationship suffered from the shock of it all and we didn’t ask for any help. Now I know we should have. Luckily we have both now sought external support and are so proud of our special family of three.
EMPOWERMENT: Once pregnant, I knew I wanted to do more with my experience than just go through it. I was already podcasting and knew this conversation could really be brought to life, so I created this podcast to share, to explain, to connect and to encourage more of what was then a difficult and taboo conversation for many. I also wanted to make sure that men were heard more. My husband often felt that his viewpoint wasn’t important during our consultations, and I’ve heard many men echo this sentiment, so I’ve been on a mission to give male fertility a voice. You can hear previous episodes here.
Most of all, though, this podcast was created to be a place of solace, a friend, and somewhere you can rely on for evidence-based information.
Kate Davies has hosted the podcast with me since 2019, she’s my ‘science bit’ and I’ve taught her everything I know from my 20-year-long broadcasting career. Kate and I met when I was just starting the podcast and she was launching her practice, working as an Independent Fertility Nurse Consultant. She was one of my early podcast guests and we’ve become great friends. She is a wonderful person and now a trained Yoga teacher also which I’m very proud of, being a fellow Yogi!
Kate is passionate about educating women about their menstrual cycles and natural fertility, and how to manage conditions such as PCOS and Endometriosis. She is a huge advocate for empowering you to push for answers on your journey and loves research papers. Kate will always want to see the evidence which I love, as you can find yourself down rabbit holes when researching fertility. Together we re-organised the podcast starting from where we thought your journey might have started and we followed all routes to parenthood, giving you as much useful content as possible as having our resident fertility expert Dr James Nicopollus answering your questions in our ‘Ask the Expert’ weekly feature. It was brilliant working together.
However, I’ve now handed over the mic to Kate and she’s going to be flying solo taking this podcast back to its routes, once again sharing patients’ stories. Our hope is that your find commonality and community in our content, and all I ask, is you let us guide you to the many brilliant people we’ve met along the way, hear their stories and their wisdom, and whatever stage you are at, know you aren’t alone. xx
FERTILITY MATTERS AT WORK
This is where you’ll find me today, putting all my energies into changing your experience at work when you are trying to grow your family.
In terms of education and support, I hope this podcast is a really useful reference point for you. Please know that if you are struggling to talk about what you are going through or are worried about what your employer might think or do if you disclose your plans – I’m one of three co-founders of Fertility Matters at Work which is a really exciting well-being and digital media company on a mission to educate the workplace on the support people need when they are trying to bring home a baby. We are dedicated to normalising the conversation about infertility within the workplace, by creating a cultural shirt within the well-being agenda at work to talk about these issues
This is not a tick-box exercise to write a policy, oh no. We want to change the misconceptions so many people have about fertility treatment being a lifestyle choice and something that always works and we are doing this through our unique E.A.S.E Methodology to help organisations become fertility friendly.
Plus we have a podcast (course we do) called The F Word at Work, so have a listen
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