Overcoming Painful Periods and Infertility (Episode 304)

Full Transcript: Episode 304

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Welcome to the Fertility Friday Podcast, your source for information about the Fertility Awareness Method and All Things Fertility. I’m your host, Lisa Hendrickson-Jack. I’m the author of The Fifth Vital Sign and the Fertility Awareness Mastery charting journal. I’m a certified Fertility Awareness Educator and holistic reproductive health practitioner with nearly 20 years of experience teaching women to connect to their fifth vital sign through menstrual cycle charting, balancing hormonal health, and optimizing the menstrual cycle without hormones. I’m outspoken about hormonal birth control and its impact on fertility and overall health, because you have the right to know how your body works and how artificial hormones disrupt that natural process. I host live coaching programs to help you achieve optimal fertility and health, because it’s important to have healthy menstrual cycles regardless of whether or not you want to have babies. I’m also a wife and mother of two beautiful boys — I know, I know, I’m a busy girl, but I manage to fit it all in. This podcast is designed to empower you to take full control of your cycles, your fertility, and your overall health, and I’m so excited that you’re here with us today.

Today I’m sharing a new installment of my Fertility Awareness Reality Series. I’m interviewing Angie, who is a current member of my Fertility Awareness Mastery Live group program, and in today’s episode we talk about some of the challenges Angie faced when she was younger. Like many women, she struggled with painful, heavy periods and was told there was nothing she could do, and I know listeners will appreciate her story. I always hear from my clients that these are some of their favorite episodes, and I really love having the opportunity to showcase real women’s stories so we can start to normalize some of the experiences we have and learn from each other.

So without further ado, let’s jump into today’s episode with Angie. I’m excited to be here today with Angie. Angie is a member of my current Fertility Awareness Mastery group program, and at this point we’ve had a few sessions together — we’re almost midway through our program together. So without further ado, welcome to the show, Angie.

Angie: Hello, thank you for having me.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, I’m glad to have you with us today on the show. I was sharing with you before we started recording that these have fast become some of my favorite episodes to record, because I always love having the opportunity to share real women’s stories, and I know my clients really resonate with these episodes. So before we jump into the session part of our call, I’d love to give you an opportunity to share a little bit about your experience. When did you start menstruating, did you use birth control before, and basically what led you to jump into the program at this stage?

Angie: Sure. So I think I was about 12 the first time I got my period, and it seems like from what I’ve heard in some of your past stories, I did have a very heavy period at that time, but I didn’t take any contraceptives at that stage — I sort of just dealt with it in my younger years for however many years. Unlike some of the people I’ve heard you speak to, I didn’t really ever take a contraceptive throughout my whole journey until I was 21, when I took one for about two years. Then when I was about 30 I took Implanon for about a year, but I had a whole bunch of issues with it — I didn’t get my period for six months, and then I got my period every two weeks for six months, and it was just all over the place, so I stopped taking it.

I feel like I did suffer quite a lot when I was younger from heavy period pain, and it was only when I was about 33 that I started trying naturally to conceive. I tried for about 12 months and was unsuccessful, and given my age, the practitioners I saw at the time told me the only option was to do IVF. So I started a course of IVF and did two rounds, and it wasn’t successful. At the end of those two rounds, I was told by my specialist that I wasn’t able to conceive — that I wasn’t able to have children because I had a very low egg count. So around 34 or maybe 35, I thought I wasn’t actually able to have kids anymore, and I sort of processed and dealt with that in my life.

Then randomly, at 37, I fell pregnant, which was completely unplanned and not in the right circumstances, so I had a termination. My whole world changed again, because I realized maybe there was a chance I could have kids, and I started really looking into all of this and got onto your podcast and started doing the course. I guess the only other thing I did radically at about 36 was completely change my diet — I cut out dairy and gluten, and I actually wasn’t doing it for this reason, I was doing it for health reasons. I think that might have been one of the things that had an impact on me, because back in the day when I first started talking to people, no one ever told me that your diet could actually have an impact on your fertility. That was sort of my journey. Now I’m with my partner that I actually did fall pregnant with, and we’re wanting to try again, but I’m now 38, so we’ve got a lot more challenges for it to happen naturally.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, thank you for taking us through your journey. I always find it interesting — I’m sure you’ve heard this as well when you listen to the episodes — it’s like you take us through 10, 15 years of your life in two minutes. If you stop to think about everything you just said for a moment, how devastating it would have been to have been trying to conceive as long as you had, to have unsuccessful IVF treatments that I’m sure weren’t free, and also to have been told it’s impossible for you to get pregnant. And then to have to deal with all of that, and then to have pregnancy just randomly happen many years after that — that’s a lot to take in.

I’ve always wondered — I think physicians really have to be cautious, they don’t want to be sued, so I often think about what the motivations are behind giving that kind of a firm diagnosis, like you’re officially infertile, if you’re still ovulating and still have a menstrual cycle. It’s just that they’re not quite sure why you’re not conceiving. Have you reflected on that? I’m curious what you’ve made of it, given that you were literally told it couldn’t happen, and then it randomly did.

Angie: Yeah, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that. I think what the specialist was saying at the time is that to conceive via IVF, I wasn’t going to be successful, because when you go through a round of IVF, they grow your follicles and then extract them, and they don’t want to do that extraction process — it’s more invasive — unless you have a lot of follicles, and I wasn’t successful at growing many follicles. So unless I used a donor egg, I probably wasn’t going to be able to do IVF. But I think in his mind, falling pregnant naturally wasn’t really an option either, and so I interpreted that as, I can no longer have kids. I’d gone through two rounds of IVF, and I just thought, well, this is my life now, and I need to be thinking about other things.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, that makes sense when you break it down that way. So in a sense, it was kind of an unspoken assumption that pregnancy naturally wasn’t going to happen, since the IVF wasn’t turning out to be effective in your case, because of the limited ability to produce multiple follicles under stimulation. So the message was basically, there’s no path.

Angie: Yeah, that’s my thought process. After something like that happens, you’ve got to kind of break it down for yourself, because if you’re told that and it feels final, you kind of have to emotionally prepare yourself for that, put on some armor, and just go about your life. So the unexpected pregnancy kind of threw that for a loop. I felt like I’d had a year in my life of dealing with that, and then I moved countries from Australia to America and randomly fell pregnant two months after getting here. I wasn’t prepared for that.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah. So you mentioned that from when you started menstruating you had heavy periods that were also quite painful, and hormonal birth control didn’t really work for you, so you had to manage that on your own. So how are your periods now — how would you rate your pain and heaviness typically?

Angie: My periods were always still quite heavy, once a month, and that first day was pretty crippling — I wasn’t able to really function. As I got a little bit older, in my early 30s, it wasn’t as bad, but when I changed my diet a couple of years back, that had a really big impact, and I remember the first time, maybe two or three months after changing my diet, I had my first period ever in my entire life with no pain at all. It was amazing — I thought, look what you can do if you actually pay attention to what you’re eating and consuming. Since then I’ve had a range of hormonal issues where I’ve been under a bit of stress, and for me my period is a direct indication of that stress. The last three or four months they’ve been incredibly light, maybe only one or two days and no pain at all, but I know that’s not necessarily the normal process, and I’m hoping this month they’ll be back to normal so I can share that with you.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Well, stay tuned, we’ll figure out what the next period looks like. So the listeners can’t see, but I’m going to open up your chart so we can take a look. As we shift toward the session part of the call, let me know what you were hoping to talk about today — what’s at the forefront of your mind?

Angie: The biggest one is, although I feel confident in how I’m doing my temperatures in terms of the process — keeping it reasonably consistent with the timing, keeping the thermometer in for a few minutes, recording it every day — I’ve struggled to actually see the shift. I know the theory behind it, but I’ve never been able to look at my chart the way some of the charts you’ve shown me look, where you can clearly see a series of lower-temperature days and then a shift to higher. I’m wondering if that’s because I’ve had hormonal problems, or if it’s there and I’m just not noticing it. And then the second thing is really just a broader understanding of the mucus side of things — that’s relatively new to me compared to the temperature.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I’m looking at your chart now. I think what makes it challenging is that in your preovulatory phase, in this chart anyway, you have a couple of temperatures that are higher than the others, kind of randomly in the middle, before what appears to be the actual shift. Whenever you have temperatures spiking up and down, it makes it a little more challenging to read. I know from our previous session in the group that we were trying to figure out what could explain that, and I believe we left it at the question of alcohol consumption. So I’m not sure we’d necessarily have a definitive answer today, but the temperatures on what looks like day 10 and 11 seem high for no clear reason — they look like outliers to me.

Angie: I remember that, and I went back and looked at my notes — those were actually weekend days, the 10th and 11th. I was traveling on those two days, I was in Colorado, so a different altitude, and I might have taken my temperature at a slightly different time of day. So I wonder if that explains those two days.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That would make sense — I always joke that anytime you’re traveling, whether you’re in a different time zone or on a plane, either of those things can affect temperature, and I’m not sure to what degree a different climate makes a difference, but travel and a possible time change, plus your sleep not being quite the same in a new place, would qualify those two readings as questionable, since we can’t be a hundred percent certain. What helps when you’re figuring out temperature readings is starting to think through the different things that could affect it — travel, time zone changes, alcohol, allergies — and every woman is different, so what affects one woman won’t necessarily affect another. During your period itself, if temperatures are up and down, that’s normal and we don’t read into those. So if we set aside the period-day temperatures and treat days 10 and 11 as questionable, what we’re left with is a preovulatory temperature pattern that makes a lot more sense.

So a couple of questions: with that in mind, day 13 would be the day I’d put ovulation as an estimate. Day 14 is the first day your temperature is higher than the previous six normal temperatures, since I’m excluding the two readings on days 10 and 11.

Angie: That’s actually my second question — I feel like my temperature range seems to be a lot higher than other charts I’ve seen. Other charts seem to sit around 97, whereas mine are always quite a bit higher.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Ideally your preovulatory temperatures are going to sit a bit higher than about 97, though a lot of women’s temperatures fall below that for various reasons. Since we’re in a group setting, we see a lot of different charts and temperature ranges — some women in the group have temperatures closer to 97, and when we look at those charts we’re also talking through the possible reasons those temperatures run a bit low. So you’re well within the normal range.

Angie: Even the most recent one — I was almost at 98.5 yesterday.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yes, these are post-ovulatory temperatures, and it’s completely normal for post-ovulatory temperatures to go over 98 degrees. Taking a peek at your notes, day 16 is 98.47 and day 15 is 98.4, and you have some notes on days 16 and 17 about alcohol. Were those weekend days too?

Angie: Yes.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Even in the post-ovulatory phase, your temperature is going to respond if you’re getting up a bit later or something else is challenging it. I’ve looked at so many charts over the years that it’s fairly easy for me to tell which readings are likely outliers, and what I hope to help you do is start recognizing what affects your own temperatures, so you can note those things in your comments — for example, if you typically get up later on weekends, note the time, or just note that it was a Saturday or Sunday. Alcohol tends to raise temperature for some women more than others, but as you start identifying what affects yours, making those notes is what helps you interpret the chart going forward.

So I’d actually put the first day of the shift at day 14, since it’s the first temperature that’s genuinely higher than the previous six normal readings. If you adjust the chart’s baseline — right now it’s set at 96, but you could move it up to around 97.9 — you’d see that the majority of your preovulatory temperatures, outside of the period days and the two outliers we identified, fall below that line, and everything afterward sits above it. So it’s a bit more challenging given the outliers, but we can still be fairly confident about the shift.

One last thing — day 13 is the day I’d peg for ovulation based on your temperatures, and that also coincides with your peak day, the last day you saw stretchy mucus. After that you had one day of lotiony mucus, then shifted to dry. So even if it doesn’t look perfectly clean on the chart, the shift lines up with the mucus pattern changing.

Angie: So based on that, should I have had sex on the 13th, not the 14th?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: You had mucus on days 11, 12, 13, and 14, so sex on any of those days was fair game.

Angie: Did I actually mark all the days we had sex on the chart? Unfortunately my partner wasn’t around at that time — he was away, so that was the only day or two we had as an option.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: You’re not alone in that. Depending on where you and your partner work, or just life in general, it’s so common for a work trip to land right around ovulation. From a practical standpoint you want to time sex on your mucus days regardless — the more you chart, the more accustomed you’ll get to recognizing what your mucus looks like in your fertile window versus outside of it. It really helps to build that familiarity, even though it can be frustrating in the moment. So yes, it’s possible you missed some of the optimal days this cycle, since the temperature rise on day 14 happens the day after ovulation. My recommendation going forward is to have sex on your mucus days leading up to ovulation, and to keep having sex until you can confirm the shift — it doesn’t have to be every single day, but when you see a peak day, try to hit it. And if you ever have a cycle with a double peak, where mucus goes away and then comes back, it’s worth having sex again just in case, to confirm you’ve actually hit ovulation.

Angie: That makes sense. It’s a hard thing, because even if you didn’t hit the right day, if your period comes at the end of it you still feel the same disappointment as if you had tried.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Absolutely — I’ve worked with clients whose partners travel a lot, and some cycles their partner is away during that whole window, even though in their mind it still counted as a “try” month.

Angie: Yeah, for me, I know my hormones aren’t quite right at the moment, so I haven’t really been thinking that I’m going to conceive until I get things back in balance. In December I got tested and had a massive range of estrogen dominance, so I’ve been working on changing certain foods, meditating and doing yoga more, to try to rebalance my hormones. I don’t think I’m going to be able to fall pregnant until my hormones are in balance — but do you think that’s actually the case?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: I think pregnancy is possible in any cycle where you have ovulation — when your body is ready, conception happens. It’s not this perfectly logical thing where your cycle, your hormones, and your diet all have to be flawless or you won’t conceive. There are multiple factors at play in a successful pregnancy — healthy eggs, healthy cervical fluid to filter out abnormal sperm, healthy sperm, and a healthy body overall that allows conception, fertilization, and implantation to happen. I’ve worked with clients who had certain issues, and it didn’t occur to them that pregnancy could happen until something specific was addressed — but then it happened, because their body was ready. So there’s often more to it than everything being perfect.

We spoke a bit about one of the questions I’d asked you before — has your partner’s sperm been tested?

Angie: Yeah, it was done about a year ago and I was told everything was normal.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: And were you able to get a hold of the actual results, so we could go through them together?

Angie: I actually haven’t been successful in getting a hold of those, sorry.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s okay — now that we have the reminder, and since we still have another one-on-one session in the program, maybe follow up on that so we can look at it together. It’s really important to cover all the bases, especially when you already know you have challenges conceiving. Almost every client I’ve worked with who’s had a sperm analysis has been told it’s normal, but I’ve yet to see a sperm analysis that’s optimal in every area for any client trying to conceive. “Normal” means it meets World Health Organization criteria, which are actually quite low — around 4% normal morphology, 15 to 20 million sperm per milliliter, and somewhere around 50% motility — but the optimal range is quite a bit higher than that. So it’s helpful to know it’s still possible to conceive with sperm in that suboptimal range, but it often takes significantly longer, because you have a lower chance of conception per cycle.

Interestingly, even when the count is really high — I had this exact question in my Facebook group recently — I’ve noticed a tendency among some practitioners that if they see a count of, say, 80 million sperm per milliliter, but morphology is only 2 or 3%, they’ll say the count is so high that everything’s fine, without looking closely at the morphology. But if morphology is 3%, that means only 3 out of every 100 of those sperm are actually normal, which absolutely still affects your odds — it’s still possible to conceive, but the percent chance per cycle goes down with an issue like that. So it would be worth getting a look at those actual numbers, Angie. One of the things that’s really frustrating for a lot of my clients is that they’ve been doing everything — supplements, diet changes, every treatment from every practitioner — and then we realize their partner could actually do something to improve his sperm quality. That kind of thing can waste months of your life, because it takes a minimum of three to four months to start seeing improvement in a sperm result.

Angie: Okay, that’s helpful, thank you.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: So you had those questions about temperature — I’ve given you a bit of homework now that we know a few things that clearly affect your readings, like noting travel or alcohol on the chart, and we’ll keep an eye out for other factors that might also play a role. Hopefully that helps you interpret it a bit more, though it’s still a process. How are you feeling about observing mucus and everything else? Looking at your chart, it looks like you’re doing a good job with the notations.

Angie: I think the biggest question I have is that I often find when I wipe, there’s no mucus on the toilet paper, but there’s often mucus on my underwear. For example, on the last two entries, I had a sensation of smoothness, nothing showed on the toilet paper after wiping, but there was mucus on my underwear that I could pick up and finger test, and it seemed to meet the 6PC criteria.

So I guess the question is, should I be marking that, or not?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: My general recommendation for underwear observations is: if you’re wiping throughout the day — before and after using the bathroom — and you’re basically feeling a dry or smooth sensation with nothing visible on the toilet paper you can pick up, but you do see something lotiony in your underwear, then my suggestion is to write that in the comments rather than mark it directly on the chart. And if you’re approaching ovulation and you see mucus that’s clear and stretchy on your underwear, that you do need to mark, because that’s a clearer signal. That’s the line I draw.

Angie: So then technically, the last two days on my chart, should I have marked a green dot, or would I still say smooth sensation, or technically dry?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: You’d say smooth sensation, and then when marking dry, you’d note whether the toilet paper was shiny, whether there was nothing on it, or whether it was a bit damp.

Angie: Okay, that’s actually my biggest question. So the couple of days where I marked pale purple outside of the main mucus days — those should probably have been green dots?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That’s the reason for checking mucus by wiping in the first place — it helps you tell the difference between your true mucus days and your true dry days, and also between mucus and vaginal cell debris. It’s fairly common to notice something on the underwear — for anyone listening, if you’ve ever seen a white, crusty layer, or something a bit yellow, that’s typically vaginal cell debris, which is just normal shedding of skin cells in the vagina. So that’s something to help you make the distinction. Typically, if it’s truly mucus, and you’re checking consistently throughout the day, it will show up on the toilet paper too. So write it in the comments so we have that information, and we can take a look together — I find that noting when something shows up on the underwear helps differentiate true mucus from vaginal cell debris.

Angie: That makes a lot of sense. So the other question I have on the mucus side is, if I’m having sex during my fertile window, I feel like it’s going to make it harder to actually observe my mucus, because of trying to tell semen apart from mucus. Should I be doing the technique you talked about on the podcast, where you try to get all the semen out so you can actually observe your mucus clearly?

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: That is basically the best way to get a clear observation the day after sex, and I know it seems counterintuitive when you’re trying to conceive. It’s not that you’d get up right after sex — most of us, when trying to conceive, do the thing where we lie back with feet up to try to hold the semen in. About 15 to 20 minutes after sex, you can get up and go to the bathroom, which is also a good habit for clearing the urethra and reducing UTI risk in general. As you go, you allow the semen to fall out and continue to engage your muscles and wipe until it’s basically gone. The reason for doing that is so that the following day, you can actually tell what’s going on — if it’s truly a dry day, it reads as dry, and if it’s truly a mucus day, the mucus is there. I’ve had women ask if that’s essentially a form of birth control, because you’re removing the semen — but our cervical fluid has channels that rapidly transport sperm into the cervical crypts, the uterus, and the fallopian tubes within minutes of intercourse. I found a few studies that I cited in The Fifth Vital Sign showing that researchers detected sperm in the fallopian tubes within about five minutes of insemination. So what I always say is: if you’re hitting the right days and it’s still not happening, it’s not because you didn’t lie on your back long enough after sex — there’s likely something else going on worth looking into, like sperm quality.

Unless you happen to have a trapeze in your bedroom that lets you hang upside down and hold sperm right next to your cervix, lying in bed longer with your feet up isn’t a particularly effective strategy for improving your odds if there’s an underlying sperm quality issue — a lower count, or morphology issues, meaning there are simply fewer healthy sperm to begin with. In that case, it’s worth looking into something more targeted. Even with sex in general, half the semen tends to fall out regardless of position afterward. One of the things I also cover in The Fifth Vital Sign is cervical cap insemination — something you can try at home, similar in concept to what’s done before IUI. A cervical cap sits over the cervix, so if there’s a legitimate concern about your partner’s sperm, this can help prolong the time sperm are exposed to your cervical mucus, improving the odds that more of the healthy sperm make it through, since your mucus is actively filtering out the poorer-quality sperm. Your partner ejaculates into the cap, you insert it over your cervix, and it allows the cervix to sit in that semen for several hours, extending the sperm’s access to your mucus. So if there’s a real issue, we want a real solution — the timing technique alone won’t reduce your chances of conceiving, but if sperm quality turns out to be a factor, that’s something to address directly alongside anything that helps improve his sperm quality. We don’t know yet whether that’s the case for you at this point, though.

Angie: That’s really helpful, thank you.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Of course. Well, we’ve covered a lot today — before we wrap up, did you have any last-minute questions for me?

Angie: No, that’s all been so helpful, thank you so much for everything, it’s been great.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Awesome, you’re welcome. So a couple of questions for you — for a woman listening to this episode who’s trying to decide if the Fertility Awareness Mastery group program is right for her, but isn’t sure what she’d get out of it, what would you tell her?

Angie: Good question. I’d read your book and listened to the podcast before joining, but I think the biggest thing I’m getting out of it is the one-on-one interaction — being able to talk through the specifics, like how I should be charting my mucus, or where my temperature shift actually is. It’s more in-depth knowledge about the things you’re trying to figure out, with an expert like yourself.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Yeah, that’s interesting — I do my best to put out a lot of general information, but what I find with clients across the board is that people want to know specifically what’s happening with their own situation, because even with all the general information available, it can be hard to piece it together, especially if you’re dealing with challenges in your own cycle.

A lot of women listening are also somewhere on their own journey — I know a lot of listeners find this podcast after having side effects from birth control, or maybe they’re not ready to start trying yet but know they want kids eventually, so they’re trying to get informed ahead of time. What advice would you give a woman who isn’t ready to start trying right now, but is planning to in a couple of years?

Angie: Get informed. I wish I’d had this knowledge when I was 12 — so I’d just say, get as informed as you can now, so that when you are ready to try, you’re not spending years on a learning curve after the fact. Really find out everything you need to know ahead of time and get yourself prepared, so that when you’re ready, you’re actually ready, rather than needing years to get there. I wish I’d been taught this in school, and I wasn’t, and it was a bit too late for me by the time I found it.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: You’re certainly not alone in that, and I really appreciate you sharing your story so openly. I think one of the parts of your story that stands out most to me is that you were looking to improve your diet for your health, and it ended up revolutionizing your period, and you accidentally became pregnant after being told you couldn’t. Not that it was a simple or easy path, but it speaks to that connection between our overall health, our fertility, and our cycles. You mentioned at one point that your cycle feels like a direct expression of what’s happening in your life, and I think that’s the real power of charting — you come to it for the specifics, wanting to know when to have sex to conceive, or how to avoid pregnancy without hormones, but what you end up uncovering is this much deeper connection between your cycle and your overall health. Thank you so much for being here and sharing that with us.

Angie: Thank you for having me.

Lisa Hendrickson-Jack: Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed today’s show, please share it with a friend — you’ll find the show notes page for today’s episode at fertilityfriday.com/304. I hope you enjoyed today’s reality series episode with Angie. I really love doing these on-air client sessions — the reality series episodes are some of my favorites to do, because they give me an additional opportunity to connect with my clients and share some of the stories I hear all the time in my work.

It’s one of the things I think is really important for women — recognizing what’s normal and what’s typical, because if you’re experiencing different cycle challenges, you may not necessarily be talking to your friends about it. As much as we talk about fertility awareness and the menstrual cycle on this podcast, most women don’t have an outlet for these very personal details on a regular basis, so a lot of women who experience these challenges end up feeling isolated. That’s a theme that’s come up repeatedly in the current group program I’m running — a lot of the women had experienced similar things and thought they were alone, until finding this community. So if you’re thinking about coming off birth control, or you’ve had issues with your cycle, or you’re going through that wonky transitional phase after stopping birth control, I hope hearing these reality series episodes helps normalize your own experience.

And if you’re ready to take your charting to the next level, make sure to head over to fertilityfriday.com/FAM to join us for the next round of Fertility Awareness Mastery Live. Thank you for spending some time with us today — we’ll be talking about today’s episode in the Fertility Friday Facebook community, so head over to fertilityfriday.com/community to join us there. And if you know someone who could really benefit from this episode, send over the link at fertilityfriday.com/304. Thank you so much for tuning in, for sharing the podcast with your friends, and for being part of the Fertility Friday community. As always, until next time, be well and happy charting.