Show Notes
Cathy Adams is the travel news features editor for The Times and Sunday Times -- and also a person who has spent years trying to conceive her second child. Now, she's at a crossroads: give up IVF and reconcile herself to having one child, or keep adding to the £40,000 it's already cost her? Secondary infertility has never felt so difficult.
Meanwhile, Emma provides an update on her endometriosis story, as Ed Coats, medical director at The Evewell West London, addresses the treatment options for endometriosis patients who are trying to conceive. Is IVF the only answer?
You can find out more about the baby loss and miscarriage charity Gabby mentions, Chasing Rainbows, at https://www.chasingrainbowscharity.com/. You can find Hannah Vaughan-Jones' Substack at https://hannahvaughanjones.substack.com/.
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Hi, we're Emma and Gabby from BFN, the UK's biggest podcast about infertility and IVF. We're on our eighth series now, but at the beginning we shared our own IVF journeys. If you'd like to hear about them, go back to the first series of the podcast. You'll get to know us better that way, too. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
More from Big Fat Negative: TTC, fertility, infertility and IVF
Genevieve Thurley is a busy woman, what with her 1 million followers and career as a makeup artist and content creator. But today, she's making time to talk to us about her experiences of infertility and IVF.
This week we're joined by Tristan Taylor, the founder of Mandrology, who is biohacking his way to sperm health. He explains why sperm quality is a biomarker of health, in the same way that heart rate and blood pressure is -- and what you can do to improve it.
Oonagh Pickering is one of the research nurses at Tommy's whose study on graduated miscarriage care has already changed how the Scottish NHS approaches care after pregnancy losses -- and now they want England to make a change, too. Oonagh joins us to talk about how offering extra care following first and second miscarriages, including progesterone for threatened miscarriages, extra scans and mental health care, could help to prevent up to 10,000 miscarriages a year in the UK.
The sourdough baker Martha de Lacey joins us this week: she has run the full gamut of infertility experiences, from going solo to recurrent miscarriage to secondary infertility. "It's so difficult when you give yourself this story of why things happened and the meaning behind it," she says. "Actually it's just nonsense. It's all just luck."
She's a performer, musician and wickedly funny creator: Sheyi Martins-Allen joins us to talk about her experience of secondary infertility, and how her faith played into it. We also hear her gorgeous song, Stronger, which you can find on Spotify at https://open.spotify.com/track/4cqnVteEnJmuttnOJ6wXFk?si=ar63ecyLTgyKOdTxuGx2Vw&nd=1&dlsi=2bdd768cd3fd4dc5 (or search for 'Sheyi').