The Middle of Infertility with Christina Vanacore

Certified Product Launch and Operations Specialist, Christina Vanacore, discusses her journey through infertility and the lessons she learned during that difficult middle.

In this episode, I speak with Christina Vanacore, a certified product launch and operations specialist, about her journey through infertility and how the middle of difficult situations is where growth and lessons happen. Christina shares her personal journey of going through five years of infertility before having her miracle baby, and how the struggle changed her and brought her closer to her husband. We also discuss the benefit of endings and how sometimes it takes looking back to realize the lessons learned during the middle.

We touch upon the difficulties of the IVF process, including the pain and stress of ovulation testing and hormone treatments, and the importance of being open with friends for support during fertility treatments.

Despite the challenges she faced, Christina ultimately found value in the challenges and was grateful for the support of her loved ones. Her journey through infertility was difficult and painful, but her story is one of hope and perseverance. Tune in to hear more about Christina’s journey through infertility and her insights on the messy middles of life.

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https://www.agapeprofessional.com

https://www.instagram.com/agapeprofessional

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Next Door Goddess

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Transcript

[0:00:06] (Lacey): Welcome to sharing the middle, where recovering perfectionist, overachievers and anyone in the middle of a struggle come together to learn to embrace the messy middles of life. I’m Lacey, your friend in the middle and guide whose claim to fame this week is actually breaking out the breadmaker that we got for Christmas, I think, two years ago, and bacon, a loaf of bread. Today I’m joined by Christina Vanacor. She is the product doula, a certified product lunch and operations specialist and the over of agape professional. After going through five years of infertility to have her miracle baby, she felt a pull on her heart that it was time to leave corporate America and start doing business her way.

[0:00:45] (Lacey): Guided by her strong faith and core values, she helps overwhelm female entrepreneurs take their product based businesses from chaos to clarity through launch, mapping, project management, strategic planning and organization. I really love my conversation with Christina. It’s also very timely because this week is infertility awareness week, as well as Christina announcing that she’s going to be launching her own podcast, the Product Doula. We really dive into her infertility journey, and it’s so lovely to hear her vulnerability but also her humor throughout it. I really enjoyed myself, and you hear me giggle throughout. So let’s jump right in.

[0:01:33] (Lacey): Hi, Christina. Welcome to sharing the middle. I’m excited to be talking to you today.

[0:01:38] (Christina): Me too.

[0:01:38] (Lacey): My first question, as usual, is pretty simple. What did you think of first when you heard of the concept of the middle?

[0:01:45] (Christina): There’s like a lot when I think of the middle I had shared, I think I shared with you, actually, on Instagram, that my quote in my yearbook is from my favorite movie, hope floats, and its beginnings are often scary, endings are sometimes sad, but it’s the middle that counts. And so remember that when you come to the beginning. I don’t necessarily believe anymore that endings are sometimes sad after being through so many different middles in life, I guess you could say.

[0:02:08] (Christina): But I do think it’s the middle that counts. And when you’re in it, it’s so hard to see that it’s the part that counts. But all of a sudden, when you get past it, you look back and you’re like, wow, either there was a lesson learned or such, like a life change that happened because of it. And so when I think of the middle, that’s where my brain goes.

[0:02:26] (Lacey): I love that. And it’s so funny because I had not heard that Hope floats quote. And then literally the next day, I was taping with my mom and sisters, and one of my sisters mentioned the Hope floats quote, and I was, oh, I just heard this yesterday. That’s so cool.

[0:02:42] (Christina): Full circle. I love it.

[0:02:43] (Lacey): Full circle. It worked out really great. I love what you said about you used to be sad about endings, and now you can see the benefit of the endings and I think that well, let me ask this first. Do you feel like you like the middle?

[0:02:59] (Christina): Not always. I feel like there are certain middles that are fantastic. Right. I look back to the middle of my grammar school years. They were fantastic, but in the middle of them, I didn’t always think that I’m like, I don’t want to be in school. And then when it got to the end, it was sad. But then I look at the middle of my pregnancy, for instance, and as hard as my pregnancy was, it was my favorite time of life ever.

[0:03:30] (Christina): I loved every moment of being pregnant. And when the end came, as excited as I was to meet my son, I was also kind of sad because I really, really loved being pregnant, despite how difficult my pregnancy was. So I think the middle sometimes is great and sometimes is really not.

[0:03:47] (Lacey): Kudos to you for thinking that you love pregnancy even though it was hard because I had a hard pregnancies and I hated them. I do not look back on them finally. So I have a feeling you’ll have a much better relationship with the middle than me just from hearing you say that. I always like to get an idea because you mentioned not liking endings so much and accepting them. It sounds similar to me and how now I don’t like the middle and trying to learn how to accept them and evolve my relationship with them.

[0:04:20] (Lacey): Just nosy and curious as usual.

[0:04:22] (Christina): No worries.

[0:04:23] (Lacey): We do like to ground our conversation in a middle moment of your life, a story that will talk through and suss out as we go through. So what is your middle moment you’d like to share?

[0:04:35] (Christina): My middle moment is definitely going to be my fertility treatments. My tough pregnancy ended after tough years of infertility. We’re taught in high school that you get married and you do something fun and you have a baby. Well, that’s not how it worked for me and my husband. We started trying after a few years of marriage and it wasn’t happening. And I wasn’t accepting that there was something wrong. I was like, no, it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen. But it was getting to a point where it was frustrating. Like, anyone, I feel like, who has gone through fertility treatments or even just trying naturally, like every month you’re hoping this is going to be the month and then it’s not again. It’s like that middle place that you’re in of like, when is it going to happen? Is it going to happen? And then we went to the doctor and found out that I had PCOS and endometriosis and that it wasn’t going to happen for me naturally.

[0:05:36] (Christina): And so I was like, okay, what do we do? I was gun ho. I’m like, all right, this is scary as all heck there’s that beginning. That’s scary. Let’s do it. Let’s figure it out. I went through three different retrievals. I went through six different transfers, a miscarriage, all of these different moments. You get that peak of, oh, my gosh, yes, this is going to be the time. Like, everything. And you’re injecting yourself with so many hormones. And so that tricks your body into thinking like, oh, yeah, I’m a little nauseous. This must be the month.

[0:06:07] (Christina): And then you get that negative test again. I ended up having to need surgery in the middle of my fertility treatment. So I went through three rounds. And then I felt like deep down inside, I was like, something’s not right. Something’s still not right. And I’m glad that I did because when we went in for surgery, it turned out that my uterus was like a hostile environment and it was never going to accept a pregnancy no matter how we looked at it. And so we did surgery, and I had to remove one of my tubes and all of the things.

[0:06:37] (Christina): And then you have to wait six months after surgery before you can try again. So now they’re like, giving you hope again. Well, it doesn’t mean that you have to stop doing anything with your husband. So maybe you do have one tube. And I was like, okay, here we go again. Maybe I won’t have to inject myself with yet another needle. And it didn’t. And so then we went back into IVF again. It was our last two embryos that were frozen.

[0:07:07] (Christina): And I turned to my husband. I was like, I can’t keep doing this. Everything in my body hurts. My soul hurts on the inside. It’s too much. And we went into that transfer, and I turned to him when we came out, and I was like, it worked. And he’s like, how do you know? It’s 3 seconds after they just put them in there. And I was like, I don’t know, but I know in my heart that this worked. And he’s like, okay, he’s heard that before.

[0:07:35] (Christina): And my husband’s not like an overly emotional person. I am. And then you inject me with hormones, and I’m all over the place.

[0:07:43] (Lacey): That is similar in my relationship where I have all of the emotions.

[0:07:47] (Christina): Yes, I have all the emotions. And he is like, a few. A couple, right? Exactly. There’s a couple. Two weeks later, we get the call in the middle of Walmart. I’m trying to keep a serious face because I don’t want my husband to know, because I don’t want to tell him. In the middle of Walmart, five years of treatments, and all this has accumulated into us having a baby. And I couldn’t how do I hide myself at that point? So the tears are falling. Now. He thinks I’m crying, sad tears.

[0:08:14] (Christina): And so he’s like, Honey, it’s going to be okay. And I’m like, we’re pregnant. It worked. And this little old lady, never will I forget this. She was like, 80 years old. Heard me say it, Tim, as she’s walking past with a car. And she’s like, Congratulations. I look back at that time because then even after we’re watching the numbers and making sure they’re growing week after week, then my progesterone wasn’t getting higher. So, like, we’re going to keep going for the progesterone, okay? Then you graduate to the regular doctor and they’re still going with the progesterone. And I’m like, when do I get to stop with the progesterone?

[0:08:50] (Christina): They test me again. They’re like, well, now you have gestational diabetes, so we’re going to just give you insulin injections. And I was like, I’m just going to keep needling it’s fine. Don’t worry. I’ll be fine. And I turn to my son now he’s five now, and I tell him when he’s, like, making me, like, super frustrated, I’m like, 150 needles. 150 needles. That middle moment sucked. Sucked being in it. Right between just the hormones and the craziness of not knowing if this was going to work and was all of the effort that I was putting into it and the stuff that I was physically putting into my body, like, was this really going to pay off and I was going to be able to have what I have today?

[0:09:32] (Christina): I didn’t know. And now I look back on it and what it did for my marriage in terms of us growing closer together and how much we look back and we appreciate what we have in the fact that we’ve been blessed with our son. The Middle changed me in a way that I don’t know that I would have ever been able to change and grow the way I did because of that experience.

[0:10:00] (Lacey): Today’s episode of Sharing the Middle is brought to you by Next Door Goddess Handcrafted Jewelry. If you’ve been a listener of Sharing the Middle, you know that I love this Byron jewelry that’s inspired by the Mediterranean coast. It helps you embrace and celebrate your beauty. Each element is sourced from a small business handcrafted in small batches and only made while the Creator is in their best mood.

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[0:10:54] (Lacey): Release your inner goddess today. As usual, so many things that I want to ask and talk to you about. But before I jump into that, I think that it’s awesome. I think that sometimes that’s what I’m learning, that the Middle is what changes you. But you don’t see that until after you leave it. And so to hear you say that you see that and that you appreciate it and that those hard times did make you stronger and all those things.

[0:11:27] (Lacey): That’s beautiful. That’s really cool.

[0:11:29] (Christina): Thank you.

[0:11:29] (Lacey): I don’t know how to say this without sounding like a jerk and I’m making it about me. So I just want to preface it.

[0:11:35] (Christina): It’s okay. Ask all the questions.

[0:11:37] (Lacey): Your journey is what I thought my journey was going to be. So I was diagnosed with PCOS before attempting to have children. And the doctor was like, when you turn 30 or when you want to kids, we are going to have to talk. And I was gearing myself up for your fight. So to hear you talk about it, I’m going to get teary and that it was successful. So even though I didn’t have to go through that to know that I was gearing myself up for that fight, I don’t know the connection there. It’s just there’s something. So it makes me so grateful to hear your story and to know that even if mine had worked out differently, I could have had that fight and I could have had that support.

[0:12:20] (Lacey): It’s like seeing yourself in an alternate universe.

[0:12:23] (Christina): I understand what you’re saying 100%. I feel similar when I see people now that are going through that journey and that maybe don’t have the outcome that I have. Because that for me is like an alternate universe of like, what if this wasn’t my outcome? Because it’s really easy for me to look back now and see how this changed me and changed me in a good way. But I don’t know, if I had not had the outcome that I had, would I feel the same way?

[0:12:51] (Christina): And so I understand exactly where you’re coming from with that.

[0:12:55] (Lacey): As you’re talking, I’m feeling it in my soul because I’m like, this is the battle I was preparing for. It’s almost like I’ve seen this in my mind before. I do want to know just because a few episodes ago we talked to Dr. Jennifer. She’s the bomb. And she talked about the period of trying. And for me, that like twelve months that you have to try. It sounds to me like you tried naturally for a little bit longer.

[0:13:23] (Lacey): And so I’m just curious about that period before you got into the really hard stuff. I mean, it’s also hard stuff, but that initial middle of trying without knowing all the problems yet. I’m just curious about how you think that was different than the rest of your journey.

[0:13:43] (Christina): I almost grouped that into the whole journey for us because when I first started we’re going to keep this all peachy. When you first started?

[0:13:55] (Lacey): I know, it’s so weird. I’m asking about how much you have had text. I’m not.

[0:14:00] (Christina): But I am.

[0:14:01] (Lacey): And it’s just again, you share what you want.

[0:14:04] (Christina): At first it’s fun because it’s like yeah, we’re going to have a baby, and we’re going to just do things to have one. And then you got to like month six, and now it became like, all right, I feel the pain. It’s time to do the thing whether you want to or not. I don’t care if you have the headache. I don’t care if I have the headache. Just do what you got to do. Finish it up. And then by month twelve, because we did it for like, two years of trying, naturally, by month twelve, there was no more fun.

[0:14:36] (Christina): It was now like a fight. We would be fighting in the middle of it because I was just like, I don’t want to be doing this. You don’t want to be doing this, but this is the time, this is what the clock says that we need to be. And then I’m buying all the tests, like the sticks, right, that you pee on. And so I’m like, okay. And then I’m starting to look and this is when I started realizing something was not right.

[0:14:58] (Christina): So my mom has passed, but my mom always had very heavy menstrual cycles, and she always had very bad cramps in the middle of her cycle. And so when I did, it just kind of aligned with my mom did, and so now I did. Well, now looking back and understanding what my diagnosis is, my mom clearly had problems as well. I’m an only child, so this is why I’m an only child. And so I would pee on these ovulation sticks, and some months they would light up, and other months they wouldn’t. And I’m like, I felt the pain where’s my stick lighting up, and so that’s when I started questioning. But in my mind I was like, well, I’m buying the cheap ones from Walmart. Like, maybe they’re just not so good.

[0:15:49] (Lacey): Blaming on the quality.

[0:15:53] (Christina): Then when I went and started going into the fertility testing and found out that I had PCOS and that there’s months when I don’t ovulate, but the pain I’m feeling are just my cysts bursting that are double over in pain kind of pain. And on top of it, I have the endometriosis. And so my tubes were blocked anyway, so they had no place to go. The eggs, once they got it, once they dropped.

[0:16:15] (Lacey): So no wonder it was so painful. Yeah, absolutely.

[0:16:19] (Christina): Like I said, I kind of group it all together because what started to be like a fun journey for my husband and I became a job. It just became another thing for me to have to worry about. Like, did I pee on the stick today? Is the timing right? Do we do it the morning? Do you do it in the afternoon? Is it too bright? Is it not bright? And it just wasn’t fun anymore. And that’s not fun for anyone, not at all.

[0:16:46] (Christina): I look at the whole journey, like, I say that it was a five year journey for us because it was two years that and then three years of the fertility treatments, the testing, the surgeries, all of that to get to where we were. The whole thing just it started out really great, and then it just sucked. Well, then it ended great. And then it ended great.

[0:17:06] (Lacey): It ended great. I ask because I’m also curious. I don’t know much about IVF and that kind of stuff, except that it’s very taxing and it’s very expensive. I’m curious about your feelings during that initial period versus let me go back. You did a couple of rounds of IVF before your surgery and then a couple of rounds after. Am I right?

[0:17:29] (Christina): Yes.

[0:17:30] (Lacey): Wolf okay. Were you just laid up for, like, three years? I can’t even imagine.

[0:17:36] (Christina): So the hormones are no joke. And I am very, very thankful that I was still working in corporate at that time. I own my own business now, but I was still working in corporate. And I was best friends with my boss. He and I were just really good friends. We went to the same church together. And he knew my husband. His wife ended up being my babysitter for a little while after I had my son. We’re just really great friends.

[0:18:01] (Christina): They were the first people that we told when we had to go through IVF because I needed him to know that I didn’t know what this was going to look like for my work schedule anymore. I didn’t know what this was going to look like for me mentally anymore. And so I had to bring him into the loop. His first response was, is this going to be like Pulp Fiction and can I jab you in the heart with the needle?

[0:18:20] (Christina): My boss is a first response. And my husband’s, like, looking at me. He’s like, do we get to jab you in the heart with a needle? He’s like, no. Jabbing in the heart with a needle. I would go to work swollen sometimes, and I was hiding it from everyone because I didn’t want anyone to know. Like, no one in my family knew we were going through this. No one at work knew I was going through this other than the woman in HR and my boss. And then I would have the egg retrievals. And so when the egg retrievals like, that’s a surgery. Like, you’re going under anesthesia, they’re popping your ovaries and pulling out your eggs.

[0:18:54] (Christina): I would then have to take, like, two days off. And thankfully, I had a lot of eggs like a chicken. I didn’t have to have a lot of retrievals. And so that’s like, the most time that you’re really laid up is when you’re healing from them. I did have an overreactive stimulation to my first amount of drugs that I did, and so they got 23 eggs out of me, the first retrieval. And then I blew up, and I was in so much pain. And literally when I would walk, I could feel my ovaries rubbing against each other inside of my body.

[0:19:31] (Christina): And so that was, like, the worst time. I was laid up for, like, five days, and that was not intentional, and I felt terrible, but I had a misfort. I couldn’t move. I’m like, this is weird. I can feel my organs touching each other. Like I don’t like it. Something’s not right. And then when I would do the transfers, you basically want to lay flat on it? Depends. I always laid flat on my back for 24 hours after a transfer, with the exception of my second transfer, where my dog’s eye popped out of his head after the transfer.

[0:20:02] (Christina): I’m telling you, this journey was something.

[0:20:05] (Lacey): I know I laugh because, one, that’s how I deal with things, but I also sometimes when people talk and they’re telling their story, I’m like, this is a sitcom. Yeah, of course you’re laid up. And then the eye popped out.

[0:20:19] (Christina): Like, what? I can’t even fathom. We came home like, this is so sidebar story. But we come home from the second transfer. I had had the miscarriage after my first transfer. So we come home from the second transfer, lay in there, trying to be as still as possible because I don’t know, in my head, the stiller I was, it was easier for them to find where they were going. I don’t know. My husband goes, what happened to this dog?

[0:20:45] (Christina): And I looked down and our little Yorkies, oh, he’s popped out of his head. Oh, my gosh. And I was like, well, now I can’t lay down. Like, we have to take him to the hospital, obviously. And so I did not lay down for that 24 hours because a dog’s eye popped out of his head. And I couldn’t send my husband by himself because who was going to hold the dog with the eyeball? And so I would miss, like, 24 hours of really just laying down after my transfers.

[0:21:14] (Christina): Looking back, I feel like I was just, like, in a fog during those months. I don’t know if it was hormone induced fog, stress induced fog, what it was. It was just like a fog of worry and excitement and wonder and hope and disappointment and all of the emotions that go along with trying to conceive and then having synthetic hormone jacked into you every day. And then just being sore, like you’re sore because you’re growing extra eggs. You’re trying to make your uterus happy.

[0:21:50] (Christina): You’re putting things inside you that you don’t necessarily want to be doing. It’s just a lot. It’s a lot.

[0:21:58] (Lacey): And you have to do it pretending like you’re not. That’s the part that I keep going back to. Three people knew.

[0:22:07] (Christina): Yeah, and we did, and we pretended like we weren’t, and so we would pretend that nothing was happening. And then when we started after I had my surgery so when I had my surgery, we lied to my family about why I was going in for surgery because we didn’t want to tell them. Because I felt like as soon as they knew I was going in for something like female related, they were going to start asking more questions.

[0:22:32] (Christina): And so I told them I was going into surgery for my colon because I’ve always had stomach issues. And it made sense. It was a laparoscopy. They didn’t know what they were touching when they went in there. And we started our next round six months later. And at that point, we started telling our friends because I was canceling plans or I would have to randomly run outside to inject myself with a needle.

[0:22:56] (Christina): And so we started telling our friends. Our family lives 2 hours away from us, so we don’t see them often, so it was a little easier to keep it hidden from them. But our friends, we were seeing them. But then it came with the questions of like, well, when are you having a transfer? Or Are you winking at me? And I’m like, Why are you winking? Do you have something in your eye? I’m not telling you anything. Please stop asking me these questions.

[0:23:20] (Christina): Because I also wanted to have my big reveal moment of saying that I was pregnant. Like, five years of trying. I wanted to have my moment of being like, hello, we’re pregnant. And we didn’t even get that moment because the old lady at Walmart.

[0:23:39] (Christina): When.

[0:23:39] (Christina): We announced to our family it was Christmas Day, and we walk into my house and my cousin was also pregnant at the same time. And so they announced to our family with, like, a big shebang, and what am I supposed to do? They were due three days after us. So I just was like us too. And that was my announcement to my family. So, again, it’s sitcom style life that I was leading. But it’s okay. It’s all good. It’s all good. I look back on it with I wouldn’t say fondness, but I’m happy for the changes that I went through because of it.

[0:24:12] (Lacey): Kudos to you. And I’m so happy that you ended up with your son and that the journey really was worth it for you.

[0:24:19] (Christina): Thank you.

[0:24:20] (Lacey): So I do like to bookend our conversations with pieces of advice, whether that’s yourself, looking back on what you went through, or just a piece of advice that you have really lived or used in your life. What would you like to share?

[0:24:36] (Christina): I’m going to give two. So one would be for people who women who are going through and men that are going through fertility treatments and infertility is not to say to enjoy the journey, but have grace with yourself and with your partner, because this is not a journey that you’re on alone. You have your partner. And even if you are alone, I have a friend who did this alone. She was ready to be a single mom.

[0:25:04] (Christina): And it’s not a journey for the fiend of heart, that’s for sure. But no matter the outcome, you are a warrior. You are amazing for what you’re doing. And at the end of the day, it’s going to change you, no matter how you look at it. And so be open to the change at some point, be able to step back and look at that time that you were in the middle and recognize that change. Just in general, I would say I still stand by what Hope Floats has to say that beginnings are scary, but it’s the middle that counts. And endings don’t have to be sad, but when you come to the ending, take that moment to look back, because there was something in that journey. There’s a reason why you went through that middle and recognize it and own it.

[0:25:54] (Christina): Own what that is.

[0:25:56] (Lacey): Thank you so much for joining me. Where can people find you? We didn’t even talk about your business at all, so if you want to explain that real quick.

[0:26:04] (Christina): Yeah, so my business actually started because of my journey through fertility treatments. Because after having my son, he was seven weeks old, I was getting ready to go back to work, woke up in the middle of the night crying, looked at my husband, was like, I’m not going back to work. And he’s like, how are you going to make money? I was like, I’ll figure it out. And so I started my business. And so I am the owner of Agape Professional. That’s my business name. And you can find me at Agape Professional.com or on Instagram at Agape Professional.

[0:26:32] (Lacey): Thank you so much for joining me today. I really enjoyed listening to your story and got a lot out of it, and I know other people do amazing well.

[0:26:41] (Christina): Thank you so much for having me. This was really fantastic.