116. What do you do when doctors tell you you’re in menopause at age 31? For Alisa, it wasn’t the end of her motherhood story—it was just the pause button before giving birth to her daughter at 47.
On episode 116, Alisa experienced unexplained hot flashes and night sweats in her early thirties, no doctor thought to test her hormone levels because of her young age. It wasn’t until she was diagnosed with advanced early menopause at 31 that her long, winding path to parenthood truly began, a journey that would span a divorce, years of self-advocacy, and knowing the love of her life for years.
In this open and inspiring episode, Alisa candidly shares how she navigated choosing donor eggs, traveling to Barbados for IVF, overcoming pregnancy anxiety, and ultimately welcoming her baby girl at age 47. From using a laptop and a glass of wine to pick their egg donor to experiencing a room full of supportive women during her delivery, Alisa’s story is a powerful reminder that motherhood over 40 doesn’t follow a rigid timeline and your dream is worth fighting for.
About the Guest
Alisa Purdie is an entrepreneur, business coach, and first-time mom who gave birth to her daughter at age 47. After being diagnosed with early menopause at age 31, she spent years researching alternative paths to building a family. Today, she uses her platform and Instagram community to connect with, encourage, and normalize the journey for women navigating fertility treatments, donor eggs, and motherhood later in life.
Connect with Alisa:
- Instagram: @ivf_over_45
Key Topics
- Undiagnosed Early Menopause: Navigating hot flashes, missed hormone tests, and an early menopause diagnosis at age 31.
- Choosing a New Path: Transitioning from embryo adoption to donor egg IVF with her second husband.
- The Donor Selection Process: How Alisa and her husband selected their egg donor and had an open Zoom call before the transfer.
- Destination IVF in Barbados: The experience of receiving holistic, compassionate fertility care abroad.
- Overcoming Pregnancy & Postpartum Anxiety: Dealing with the fear of “waiting for the other shoe to drop” and adjusting to life with a newborn at 47.
- Postpartum Care & Advocacy: Hiring a private OB for home visits, managing low milk supply, and trusting your maternal instincts.
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Transcript
Jamie: Elisa, welcome to the show.
Alisa: Hi, thank you so much for having me.
Jamie: Today we are sharing her story at 47 with donor eggs. But before we get started, will you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Alisa: Yes, of course. I’m Elisa. I’m 47. I went into menopause at 31, and I was married to my first husband, and we had a difficult time conceiving and did some testing. And turns out I was going into menopause, and we ended up separating and getting a divorce.
Jamie: Will you tell us a little bit about-
Alisa: Yeah
Jamie: What made you believe that you were in menopause?
Alisa: The first indication was that we were not having any success trying to conceive naturally. I was getting regular periods. There was nothing indicating that anything was wrong. But I was having night sweats and hot flashes during the day and I thought, “Oh, I’m under a lot of stress.”
‘Cause here’s another layer to that, is I actually was a amateur bodybuilder for four years during this time, and doctors have told me that’s likely what contributed to early menopause. Over-training and under-eating is horrible for your hormones. So all this was happening at the same time. So it was the, the night sweats, the hot flashes during the day crippling anxiety at nighttime, just waking up, mind spinning, not able to sleep. Poor sleep. These sorts of things all were happening at the same time, and no doctor ever thought to test my hormones for FSH levels, follicle-stimulating hormones, which can indicate whether or not you’re in menopause.
‘Cause I was so young, the doctors never thought that was the cause. They just thought I was over-training, under-eating and under stress.
Jamie: So you can go into menopause even if you’re still having regular periods.
Alisa: You can.
Jamie: Wild.
Alisa: Yeah. The symptoms can come before the end of, your, an interruption in your menstrual schedule.
Jamie: Okay. Do you remember what your numbers were?
Alisa: Oh, yes. I, this sticks in my brain forever. 93.
Jamie: Okay.
Alisa: And I’d have to look it up. I don’t have it cued up right now, but it was indicative of advanced menopause, so the doctor said, “Oh, yes, so you’re well past where-
Jamie: Okay
Alisa: … y- you’re not in the gray area essentially at all. You’re in.”
Jamie: What were you thinking? Were you in your relationship where you wanted to pursue something else to try and have a baby?
Alisa: Yes. And we did have those discussions, and I think that’s a g- great topic because partners don’t always come to the same conclusions at the same time when it comes to growing your family. You may not have both say, “Let’s do IVF. We’re in it together. Let’s do it. Let’s start next month.” It could be very start, stop for one person. It could be yes for one and no for the other.
So I wanted to pursue IVF at that point, or just started doing some research, and he kind of thought maybe having kids wasn’t for us, and I was happily married. And so I think this is a good topic, too, having to choose to stay in your marriage that you love with this person that you love more than anything or being a mother. So I had to make that decision, and it took us a long time. It took us a couple years to finally come to the decision to separate and pursue divorce.
It was really difficult. It was really painful, and it was a lot of start, stop, and what if this, and what if we adopt, and what if we do IVF? My mindset with most things in my life are I’m, I can make it happen. Whatever it is, I can make it happen, and not everybody’s that way. We just didn’t match, and so we went our separate ways.
Jamie: Let’s fast-forward to your second husband. Yes. What was that conversation like about kids?
Alisa: It was inspired by Instagram. It’s really funny, I have to say. But my husband and I met at work while I was in my first marriage.
Jamie: Okay.
Alisa: So he had seen me through this entire journey of being married, getting divorced, the fertility stuff. He was there through the whole thing because we remained friends, and we would catch up once in a blue moon and just see how the other person was doing. So he knew the journey that I was on, so it was no surprise. But we started dating 12 years after we met, so we were friends for 12 years. Finally started dating. I’d been single for many years at that point.
I made a post on Instagram about going to do IVF by myself as a single woman in Barbados. I’d done all this research years before. He and I had just started dating. I thought it was gonna be a casual thing for a little while and then disappear.
Jamie: But you were gonna use a sperm donor?
Alisa: I was going to do embryo adoption.
Jamie: Oh, okay.
Alisa: That was my plan. So after after my divorce, I’d spent a few years doing research and trying to figure out when I was ready what the options were.
Had a bunch of relationships, and then my, my husband and I started dating, And the conversation, he he walked into my kitchen one day and said, “Hey, I saw your Instagram post today.” And I was like, Oh, yeah. And he’s like, Should we talk about this? I’m like, I don’t know. Do you want to? So he said, Yeah, I do. And I was like, Okay, let’s talk about it. This is my plan, and I’ve done all this research, and if this is not something that you wanna do, if kids are not for you, if fertility treatments and the IVF path is not for you, we can go our separate ways.
This has been really fun, but this is where I’m going in my life. So if it’s not for you, let’s just talk about it now. And so he said, I’m in 100%. I’ve been in this friendship with you for 12 years. I’m excited that we’re finally in a relationship together and our timing is aligned. And I’m in. What do we do? What’s next?” And I said let’s have a consult with the folks in Barbados that I’ve already talked to so that you can ask your questions. And we’ll start there.” And so that’s what- And
Jamie: How old were you whenever this conversation happened?
Alisa: So I was 41.
Jamie: Okay.
Alisa: And we would have done it sooner ’cause we were 46 when we did IVF, but COVID happened.
Jamie: Oh.
Alisa: Which puts a wrinkle in a brand-new relationship because you can’t go anywhere or do anything. So for the better part of a year, maybe two, I don’t know, we were at home on the couch watching movies.
And so it’s hard to build a relationship when you don’t really get to have normal relationship experiences. But I’m glad. I’m glad we took our time to build a really strong foundation rather than having a baby right away when we first started dating.
And I also wanted to be married, so we took our time. We dated for three years. He proposed and we had a beautiful wedding, and then a year later we did IVF.
Jamie: And were you in a hurry? What was your mindset with kids during this time, ’cause you’re already in menopause?
Alisa: It’s funny because menopause, you can look at it a couple ways. You can look at it like, “Oh, my time is over. My, the window has closed, which some people do. But to me, I felt like there’d been a pause on the clock. So the clock was no longer ticking for me. It was just on pause so we could work around it. So it didn’t feel like such a time crunch because the doctors in Barbados, where I went will do embryo transfers until age 50.
50 was the cutoff for me. As long as you’re healthy and you feel good and you, this is what you wanna do, and you have all the the go-ahead from the doctors- … there’s no reason. Just the age is not the reason to keep you from doing it.
Jamie: So how did you go from embryo adoption to donor eggs?
Alisa: Oh. So I asked my husband and I said My plan is embryo adoption because I’m a single woman and I don’t have my own eggs. I said, But if you wanna be involved genetically, that’s a different scenario, but we can talk about it. So he said, I do. I really do. I’ve always wanted to have my own kids. And I said, So that would require donor eggs. Do you feel okay about that?” So he said, “I do. I wanna learn about it and see if there’s risks or how we go about choosing a donor,” that sort of thing. So it was just a lot of learning for both of us at that time.
And the donor that we chose we had a wonderful experience with choosing the donor and the donor eggs. Everything was pretty seamless.
Jamie: Did you go to an egg bank?
Alisa: We did.
Jamie: Oh, fun. How did you choose her?
Alisa: She was our third choice. We decided just to sit together with a laptop and a glass of wine and make it like a date. ‘Cause otherwise it’s so awkward to say, Hey, honey, here’s women on the internet. Choose one- … that you think is pretty.” It’s very awkward. So what we did was we just looked at pictures and he said, Choose some that you want me to look at, and so I did that.
We chose one. But there was a process with some of the websites that you can reserve a donor and then there’s some back and forth with the egg bank. So two that we chose ended up being chosen by someone else, ’cause we just weren’t familiar with the process with the technology of the website. So they were taken already. So that kind of, we got our hopes up and then it was like, Oh, we’re too late. That happened twice. So I put it away for a while, and I started to feel a lot of the sadness from my divorce and all those difficult conversations around it coming back. And so it was making me really sad.
I felt like I had failed in my, my part in this scenario and it’s getting really hard again, and a lot of emotional stuff came up. We agreed to take a break, and he said, Whenever you’re ready to dive back in, we will. And so one morning I just got up, made myself a cup of tea, opened the laptop and chose someone without thinking about it.
‘Cause in my mind I was thinking they’re all vetted. They’re, they’ve all been screened.” To get onto the website they’ve gone through the entire process. There’s a lot of standards they had to meet and requirements they had to meet. So I just chose one, and I asked him to come in and look, and he said, “Oh, she’s beautiful. Let’s look at her, baby photos and the family history,” and everything looked good, so we both just said yes, click. And that’s how we chose our donor.
Jamie: Now, you had a conversation with her.
Alisa: We did.
Jamie: Lee tell us about that. I’m so curious.
Alisa: Yeah, so she chose what’s called semi-open donation.
Jamie: Was that important to you?
Alisa: Not really.
Jamie: Okay.
Alisa: Not really. I didn’t really have any feelings either way. I did want to be able to ask questions later about medical information. That was important to me. Not a deal breaker, but it was important to me. So she was open to that, and she was also open to a Zoom call.
So we don’t share each other’s personal information, so we can’t just call her or reach out to her whenever we want and vice versa. But she is open to being contacted for medical purposes and also when our child is 18 she’s open to being contacted.
But we had a Zoom call with her. She’s lovely. We chatted for about an hour. And she was just so excited to, to help us and donate her eggs. She comes from a big family, so I thought, my dream of all dreams is that maybe my child has another family that she could be a part of later if she wants to be. If everybody’s in agreement, that might be an option.
We’ll cross that bridge later certainly. But yeah, our egg donor has a big family, a really supportive family. And that was important to me. The motivation for donating eggs was important to me as well.
Jamie: Wow. I would be in that call, I’d, I don’t know, I would just be so emotional I think.
Alisa: No, it was it was a great call. It’s such a gift, I think, to be able to talk to her.
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: Because now I c- I can share that, with our child later on in life. I can share that with her.
Jamie: Have you contacted her or spoken to her since you’ve had your baby?
Alisa: So part of the agreement was that we let the egg bank know if we have a successful delivery. And so we did that, and then they communicate that to her.
Jamie: Okay.
Alisa: Or the donor.
Jamie: Wow. Once I heard you say that the other day, I was like, Oh, my gosh, What are the questions would I would ask? And to me, that would be really hard.
Alisa: It’s hard.
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: It is hard. It’s such a gift, but it’s also so overwhelming. And, at that time we didn’t have a … we weren’t pregnant yet. None of that had happened yet, so you’re just projecting into the future and trying to figure out what you would want to know as future you, which is hard to do.
Jamie: Yeah. ‘Cause I would ask completely different questions before I bought eggs verse me holding my baby now.
Alisa: Exactly. Way totally different. Wow. Okay. But it’s funny now that my daughter’s here, I feel this maternal connection to the egg donor. She’s 20 years younger than I am, so she could very well be my daughter.
I just feel so grateful to her, and I get to look at her baby pictures, and I see so much of my daughter in these baby pictures, and it just … It makes me really happy. I don’t have any negative feelings. I don’t feel inferior in any way. It just was a really beautiful experience.
Jamie: Yeah. I definitely I get that, ’cause I look at my son all the time and I’m like, “Is that my husband or the donor? The husband or the donor?”
Okay. So now that you chose the donor, tell us about making embryos.
Alisa: Oh, yes. What a journey this was. So like I said, we did IVF in, in Barbados. We live in in the States, in the US, and we traveled there to create the embryos. So the donor eggs were flown from California to Barbados, and we went to Barbados to fertilize the eggs.
So we were there for about five days, which you could do it in one day if you wanted to, but we just wanted to explore the island a bit. It’s a long trip for us. And so created the embryos, and they contact you after a day and tell you how many fertilized. And we had eight eggs from our donor, and seven of them had fertilized successfully.
And that freaked me out, and I thought, “How are we gonna have seven babies?” And my husband’s “I don’t think it works that way.” Yeah. So then the next day they called and said we- s- seven still growing, and every day you get an update. And then five of them had made it to day five blastocyst stage, so they are viable at that point.
We decided to do the genetic testing, the PGT-A, on the embryos for a couple reasons, my age being a big one. We didn’t wanna transfer, abnormal embryos and have miscarriages, and we wanted to avoid as much of that as we could. So we did the testing. It was over the holidays, so it’s usually a two-week sort of process, but because it was over the holidays it was five weeks.
We waited for five weeks. And of the five embryos, two were genetically normal. They were identical in every way. The grade for both of them was 3BC. I know a lot of people like to know about the embryo grades. Which we didn’t know anything about the grades. I kinda skimmed over that information.
I didn’t know about it. I didn’t understand it. I didn’t concern myself with it. And so when we went to do the transfer about a month later, the doctor just chose one because they were the same. And we have our baby girl now.
Jamie: Wow.
Alisa: And so as a 3BC, which I later learned was a 30% chance of success but not having that statistic in my brain was probably helpful.
Jamie: Definitely.
Alisa: Sometimes ignorance can be bliss.
Jamie: Yeah. So going into the transfer, how were you… What were you doing to prep?
Alisa: Oh, yeah. I worked on some things in the years prior to doing IVF, just in my body. I had some autoimmune things happening. Turns out they were pretty extensive food allergies.
So my body was really inflamed. I was getting skin reactions when I would eat usually bread, like wheat products, wheat gluten, things like that. And I wasn’t able to lose weight, which is common when you’re in menopause as well. So I worked with a naturopath to address food allergies, and I had a long list of things I needed to stop eating.
When I stopped eating them, I lost 30 pounds, which is amazing. And I also worked with a naturopath to balance my hormones, because I hadn’t done any work on the hormones since going into menopause and for a couple years before IVF. So the hormones, the food allergies those were big ones that I worked on in my body, just to try to feel better just for my own wellbeing.
So I did that to prepare for IVF. There’s of course the protocol for IVF, the meds and supplements- … and things going into that, and that’s different for everybody. But yeah, hormone replacement was something that I did for a few years before going into IVF. So the IVF meds were about 30 days before the transfer, and then a lot of the meds were also during the first trimester, as you probably know as well.
Jamie: Your progesterone.
Alisa: Yes.
Jamie: Lovely. Continue those shots.
Alisa: And the anticoagulant shot to the belly, whoo. Yeah. That’s a big one. Yeah.
Jamie: Tell us, going to Barbados, like what a horrible place to go to, you poor thing.
Alisa: I know, right? I know. Tropical islands are very difficult to be in.
Jamie: Yeah. So you do the transfer. Did you stay there to do your betas and stuff?
Alisa: I never did any betas. Isn’t that funny?
Jamie: What?
Alisa: I know. So I always tell people, going to Barbados… And I’m not affiliated with them. I’m not paid by them in any way. But I love to talk about it because my medical care that I found here in the States was pretty traumatic and somebody should have caught the early menopause at 31, and no one did. No one thought to ask me, human-based questions. Go to Barbados, and it’s like going to the house of all your favorite aunties, and everybody’s holding your hand and giving you hugs, and it’s a medical facility of people that actually care about your feelings and your wellbeing.
And it was amazing. We stayed there for, I believe it was five days on the second trip. But again, that was to explore the island. We could have been there for one day. You could spend one night and go home if you wanted to. The doctor gave us a really funny analogy. She said it’s like putting a grain of rice in a peanut butter sandwich.
It was just really cute. Everything about it was really nice. They have a they have a holistic healing center in the same building. So I did acupuncture. I actually did acupuncture for four weeks before the transfer, once a week. That’s probably good information, too.
And then I did a session immediately before the transfer and immediately after. So the three appointments were sandwiched, and that was their recommendation. And it was great.
Jamie: I did the same. I love acupuncture. Did it relax you, too?
Alisa: It did.
Jamie: Yeah. I love it
Alisa: And I always say the one right after the transfer, I had never been pregnant before. This was my first attempt and first transfer.
All I could feel, laying in a quiet room by myself waiting for the therapist to come in and do the acupuncture, all I could feel in my belly was like this like tingling butterflies. And I was like, I wonder if that’s the embryo. And I’m convinced that it was her. But what a gift to be able to feel that because if you get pregnant naturally, you’re like, “Oh, gosh, when did this happen?”
And you’re trying to look at the calendar, and you really don’t know. But just to have that experience, I am forever grateful for that.
Jamie: Yeah. So tell us about finding out. How did you find out you were pregnant?
Alisa: So we came home, and then it’s that glorious two-week wait of trying to keep yourself busy and not take a pregnancy test and all of that.
So the clock started. We were in Barbados for three more days, so we got home. It was day four, I think. We both work from home, so we tried to keep it business as usual and try to keep busy and not take the pregnancy test that I’d already bought that were in the bathroom. ‘
Cause you wanna know, but then it’s an emotional rollercoaster if you’re looking at a negative test, and then that can affect your body. So you wanna just be as level and relaxed as possible. So I was supposed to wait, I think, 12 days. I waited 11. I caved on day 11. And of course, the universe, the tests were inconclusive.
Jamie: Hey. Oh, no.
Alisa: So on day 11. It was just the universe saying, “Hey, dummy, you’re supposed to wait 12 days, not 11.” So then the next day, I took a test, and it was glaring pregnant. It was positive. Couldn’t be more pos- It was instantly positive.
Jamie: Yeah. How did you feel seeing that?
Alisa: I don’t really … I can’t even really put it into words. So thrilled beyond belief, and also, oh my God, it worked. Because you have to be prepared for every outcome, and we talked about that extensively.
We could spend all this money and time and energy and not have a baby at the end, and that’s a real possibility. As somebody who’s been in infertility and gone through the negative emotions around it for so many years it was hard to feel happy because everything around fertility had been so sad for so long.
So I think there was probably a little bit of disassociation, honestly. What if this isn’t real? What if this is a false positive? There’s a lot of that. I don’t think it really hit me, all the joy f- didn’t really flood in and all the excitement until she was born. I think my whole pregnancy I felt like something bad was gonna happen.
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: And that was tough.
Jamie: I get that. You’re just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Yeah.
Alisa: Yeah. Yeah, my husband and I were talking about that the other night. I had a C-section, and I’d heard her crying, and I think I just released everything all at one time. All the tears came, and I just looked at him and I said, “She’s real.” Yep. She’s been in my body for almost 10 months, but I didn’t feel like she was real- Yeah … until she was actually here.
Jamie: Yeah. I, It’s funny, i was the same way. You just have a hard time believing. Okay, now I can believe it’s real? Yeah.
Alisa: And all the voices and conversations of people from the past, they don’t leave you. If you’ve ever gone through a divorce that was, largely focused on infertility, those conversations don’t leave you. So you really feel like it’s never gonna happen for you, or that window is closed, or that these phrases that you’ve said or heard are really true.
But they don’t have to be true.
Jamie: Yeah. Yeah, I love that. You found out you were pregnant. Did you see your doctor, or were there doctors here that kinda transferred your fertility in Barbados?
Alisa: Oh, that’s a great question. So when you do IVF abroad or any sort of medical care abroad and they require testing beforehand or after care you use a local doctor. So the test that we had to have before doing IVF, I had to have a saline sonogram of my uterus. I did that here locally, and so I was called a monitoring patient at the local fertility clinic, ’cause it’s just not feasible to be going back and forth to Barbados and doing all these little tests.
Then after we got the positive pregnancy test, we were still in contact with Barbados for the first, I think, month after. And then they suggested getting your OB. I think it was after 12 weeks you officially graduate. ‘Cause your meds, you’re done with your meds and everything.
So after 12 weeks of pregnancy you graduate from the IVF doctor, and then you go to your local OB. So we hired an OB privately here in our town.
Jamie: Okay.
Alisa: It was a dream.
Jamie: Yeah, what was that like finding an OB? Did you just use your one you’ve gone to before?
Alisa: No we don’t have a lot of options here for obstetrics and gynecology. It’s tough. There’s a big hospital here, and a lot of people have poor experiences or they feel, again, looked over. So we went the private doctor route this time. So-
Jamie: Okay
Alisa: … it was something that I’ve always wanted, and my husband and I both work from home. I have my own company that I’ve had for 15 years, and it was just on my mind that I wanted the best medical care I could get.
This might be my only pregnancy in my life. I’m 47. I’m high risk. I didn’t wanna be looked over in any way, so we hired a private OB who is so lovely, and we did all of the appointments at home. So she came to the house, and they were an hour to an hour and a half sometimes, depending on what we were talking about, and it was great.
And then we didn’t have to wait six weeks after the baby was born to go to the doctor, which I think is nuts. So much happens in six weeks. So Our OB came to the house two days after she, we were released from the hospital, and then weekly until I think the first eight weeks we had weekly appointments. And it was lovely. Helped me with learning how to breastfeed and, just my own recovery as the mom.
Jamie: It almost sounds like a midwife coming to your house-
Alisa: Exactly
Jamie: … and doing the appointments.
Alisa: Yes.
Jamie: That’s really lovely, having that. And I think it also helps you kind of bond with them because they are like you’re welcoming them in your own house.
Alisa: Yes. Yeah, you form a relationship. We even joke now. I texted her the other day and said, “Hey, we should have a fun girls’ brunch.” And she wrote back, “I’m in.”
Jamie: That’s cute.
Alisa: It’s really nice.
Jamie: What was important to you about her and her practices?
Alisa: I’ll step back for a moment. We started at a birth center. I like to say that I’m like crunchy, hippy-dippy in some ways. And I wanted a… I wasn’t sure if I wanted a natural childbirth. So I settled on I wanted support in childbirth so I could have the birth experience I wanted, but also have access to medication if I felt like I needed it at the moment, because I had never had a child before, so I didn’t know what it was gonna be like.
We went to the birth center, and the OB there, who was lovely had a scheduling conflict. So then we contacted this other OB, who was highly recommended, and she said because of my age and IVF baby, she doesn’t recommend the birth center. She would recommend being in a hospital. But with her care, you labor at home for as long as possible.
So she said, ” It’s not an emergency. We’re not rushing to the hospital. We’re gonna give you the experience that you want.” We also hired a doula to help with that as well. But I didn’t wanna be forced to labor in a certain position. I didn’t wanna be rushed. I didn’t wanna be pumped full of medications that I didn’t want. So she honored all of that, all of it. All of that.
She did recommend an induction at 39 weeks.
Jamie: Well, let’s talk about your pregnancy a little bit before we get there.
Alisa: Yes.
Jamie: So your pregnancy, how was it?
Alisa: I don’t have any complaints about it. It was a lot of fear around it. I think in the beginning I thought I was gonna gain 100 pounds that would never come off because of my age. I thought that my joints were gonna hurt because of all the pain I’d had from hormone disruption.
I just had all this fear around being pregnant. I thought I was gonna feel horrible. I didn’t. I had really bad nausea for the first probably four months. I wasn’t getting sick, but I felt nauseous all the time. I think the biggest symptom I had in pregnancy was zero energy. I was on the couch every single day.
My husband would say, “Do you wanna go for a walk around the block?” And I was like, “No, I wanna walk to the kitchen and back to the couch,” and that’s it. And that started to go away around month five I think, five or six. I don’t know. But yeah, I did definitely did a lot of relaxation in my pregnancy.
I gained about 40 pounds. I had gestational diabetes, which is probably the reason the weight gain leveled off, because I had to monitor my blood sugar. And I had a bit of hypertension towards the end, which was another factor in the induction. But the pregnancy itself was great.
My body responded really well to it. I didn’t get stretch marks or all the things I was scared that I was gonna get. It’s all worth it that, the baby’s here. Whatever happened to my body, what happened to my body I welcome all of it. But I had a lot of fear going into it because I’d never done it before.
Jamie: Yes.
Yeah. With using donor eggs, did you have fears about that during your pregnancy?
Alisa: No, I don’t think so. When she was born, of course, all the bonding that happens chemically. That was greater than I ever anticipated. And so if there was any fears before that, it would’ve been wiped out completely.
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: There’s nothing like it. The people say your instincts take over or your, nature sort of kicks in. It’s different for everyone, and a lot of women … I had horrible anxiety in the very beginning. And those sorts of things kicked in. But it’s very nature based and you’re going back to primitive days of you and your baby and you’re breastfeeding and you’re skin-to-skin and you’re cuddling and you’re protecting and it’s all, a bonding experience, and it’s all so wonderful.
Jamie: Yeah. What about the sex? Did you find out through the embryo testing that you had a girl?
Alisa: We did. They asked if we wanted to know and we did, and that’s mainly because my husband’s parents had both passed, and so he is 16th in line of males with the same name. There’s not even juniors anymore.
There’s 16 of them. So he really wanted the family name to continue. So I said, “Okay. If we have a, if there’s a male, we’ll transfer the male first, ’cause we may only get one pregnancy out of this. We don’t know.” And we ended up with two females.
Jamie: Lovely … two girls.
Alisa: Yeah.
Jamie: How’d you feel about having girls?
Alisa: Oh I’m over the moon. I welcome either. I was excited just to be a mom and to have a baby with my husband, who’s the most wonderful human on the planet. Just to see him as a dad was also a big part of my dream, just to watch him with his baby, and it’s everything I imagined. It’s more. It’s more. It’s better.
Jamie: What about products-wise, was there anything that helped you through pregnancy that you could recommend?
Alisa: I think my biggest issue was the nausea. It was pretty debilitating the first four months. I was actually medicated for nausea. As somebody… I don’t like medication. I have like a phobia around being overmedicated and the pharmaceuticals that are handed to you all the time. But my OB said, “I can give you a prescription for anti-nausea medication,” and I had fear on what that would do to the baby. And she said it’s perfectly safe in pregnancy, and it changed my life.
My advice to other women is ask for help. It’s okay. You’re not the first person to need this. And y- yeah, it was debi- … I couldn’t function. I was just laid up all the time. So that was something that really helped, a prescription for anti-nausea medication.
It also helped me sleep at night, ’cause I wasn’t sleeping well. But I just think being really careful with your nutrition and how that’s affecting your pregnancy symptoms, because your body’s gonna need different things in pregnancy than what you need normally. Yeah, I think maybe just vitamins, being really careful about what you’re eating.
Also, if you’re in the first trimester and all you want is beige foods, I don’t know if this was you, but I told my doctor, I said, “All I can eat are french fries and potatoes and bread.” And she said, “Yeah, that’s common in the first trimester.” It’s something about beige foods and carbs. It just settles the stomach. So I think it’s also just knowing that this phase is not gonna be forever. And pregnancy is its own stage, and you just kinda gotta go with it, and don’t beat yourself up if you’re-
Jamie: Yeah
Alisa: … eating french fries every day.
Jamie: Yeah, that’s a great point, ’cause you’re so worried about everything that you do, and- all you’re eating is I had grilled cheese. You’re worried about it.
Alisa: I know. I had grapes. Grapes. My husband would go to the grocery store twice a day for grapes because I could- … eat grapes. I think it was the sugar and the water maybe. I don’t know. That’s all I would eat.
Jamie: Having this be your first baby, how did you prepare for her arrival? and for motherhood for that matter?
Alisa: I think you try to do all the things, and then when they get here, they don’t really need as much as you think they need.
Jamie: Definitely.
Alisa: I think we are in the age of TikTok and Instagram overload. And it’s like you need all these products, and you need this and you need that. And we have a bedroom for her, which is a blessing, and I made it cute and have a little dresser in there and changing table and all the things. But I have a crib in there. It has my laundry in it. She’s never slept in it.
So to prepare, we did set up a bedroom for her, and the sleeping has been… I want to give every mom just be kind to yourself. If your baby sleeps in bed with you and you’re all sleeping, great. St- don’t worry about all, all these, you know, experts are telling you to do or not to do.
We have a lot of things for her that we’ve never used because she sleeps in bed with us. She’s four months old. And yeah we prepared the best we could. We had a baby shower, which was great because then other people who have babies can say, “We used this. We didn’t use this.” Setting up her bath things to give her baths, and you think your baby needs a bath every night. They don’t. When they’re a newborn, you don’t bath, you don’t bathe your child every night.
So yeah, we just prepared the best we could. We went through online forums and blogs and things and set some things up for her, and I think we did all right. I think we did all right. Yeah.
Jamie: Did you take any classes?
Alisa: We did a baby basics care class, and we did that because my husband had never been around babies before. My mom did daycare my whole life, so I was around babies my whole life, and my sister is almost 10 years younger than I am, so I was very well-versed in taking care of babies.
It’s much different when it’s your own, of course. But I didn’t take any birthing classes. I didn’t take any, anything beyond that one day. It was probably on my list of things to do, but I just didn’t do it.
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: And sometimes the less you know, the better you are, ’cause then you can trust yourself. I think you really create more stress for yourself when you are worried about all these little nuances and taking your child to specialists all the time and trying to, do things that aren’t coming naturally.
Jamie: Yeah. That’s a good point.
Alisa: Sometimes less information is better.
Jamie: Is there anything else about pregnancy you wanna mention before we get to your birth story?
Alisa: I think it was just a really beautiful time. I, I felt really good in my body. I felt strong. I worked out zero times- … because I didn’t have any energy. Oh, I think I swam in my friend’s pool. I floated a couple days. That might be it. But just if I can give anybody else some insight, just take every day as it comes.
Rest as much as you possibly can. I know not everybody works from home for themselves, but rest as much as humanly possible, and just enjoy every single day.
Jamie: I love it. So for your birth, you were scheduled to be induced. You said 39 weeks?
Alisa: Yes.
Jamie: Okay. Tell us about that. You’re going in for an induction, then what happened?
Alisa: Nothing happened for three days.
Jamie: Oh, you poor thing.
Alisa: I know. We went there, and the OB met us, and the doula met us, and they started a medication called Cervidil
Jamie: Oh, I think I took that. It’s a pill in your mouth, right?
Alisa: You could take it, a pill in your mouth, or you can take it internally, almost like it’s administered like a tampon.
Jamie: Okay.
Alisa: Yeah. So I did the, the tampon version, and it’s supposed to soften the cervix and start labor, and so within 12 to 24 hours. And nothing happened. So I slept great that night. The next morning, no contractions, nothing. The OB came back, “How did you sleep?” I said, “Oh, I slept great.” And she said, “Oh, that’s not good.”
She started a second medication, I can’t remember the name of it which is supposed to start labor, and that didn’t do anything. So then they added in some Pitocin, which didn’t do anything. And then they went the manual route, which is a Foley balloon. Oh.
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: It’s called a Foley bulb. It sounds like you’re familiar.
Jamie: Was it painful? I’ve heard terrible things about it.
Alisa: One reason that we chose this OB is that she is fine and recommends pain management for women. So she recommended fentanyl in the hospital during the insertion of the Foley balloon. Otherwise, I don’t even know how painful it would… It would’ve been horribly painful. That was in for I think 12 hours, again, overnight. And I think I got dilated to maybe a two, two centimeters, and I was having really small contractions. But we were on day three at that point, and so my little girl had not moved an inch and I was not dilating, and we were day three.
The doctor came in the morning and she said, “I know you don’t want a C-section, but that’s the course of action. We really need to get little mama out of your belly and get things moving for you because you can’t just continue, and your body is not responding, and let’s get this baby out.”
Jamie: How’d you feel about that?
Alisa: I was tired, and I love our OB, and I trust her completely. And so I just looked at her and I said, “You’re in charge. And if that’s what you recommend let’s go.” And so I thought we would have a day or whatever to think about it, and she goes, “Great. Let’s get you ready. The, the OR will be open in 30 minutes.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, 30 minutes.” So we got ready. We headed across the hall, and they had me up on the table, and did a spinal to numb me, and that worked immediately, and she was out in less than 10 minutes.
Jamie: Yeah. Did you get to hear her cry?
Alisa: I did. She came out so loud. She was screaming and kicking and punching. It was just so funny. So it was immediate, just relief and joy and excitement, and she’s real feeling, that was finally here. So it was an easy, wonderful experience.
Jamie: That’s amazing. Did you have any things you were particular about after she was here?
Skin-to-skin, stuff like that?
Alisa: Oh, we had a whole birth plan. Our doula was lovely and gave us a, a template for a birth plan because, you don’t know what you don’t know, and we’d never done this before.
It was like a step-by-step things that are available to you. So would you like a golden hour where nobody bothers you for skin-to-skin? Do you want help breastfeeding? Do all the different things that you can do as a brand-new mama with your baby. We had her in the room with us the whole time. We were there for another three days. So I think we were in the hospital for six days total.
It was a long time. We had her in the room the whole time. We didn’t want her in the nursery or any of that. I think I had a little bit of anxiety about her being away from me. It was a great experience. We were happy to be home. We were just wanting to go home. We had space at home and we weren’t all cooped up in the same room.
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: So we were just happy to come home.
Jamie: How was it taking her home?
Alisa: Oh, it was terrifying.
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: I sat in the backseat, and my husband drove for 12 miles an hour the whole way home. Yeah, it’s pretty scary the first time you go… You have your baby in the car. You could summon-
Jamie: It really is. Every bump,
Alisa: you’re just like Run into. Yeah. Yes.
Jamie: Yes.
Alisa: Then you have to take her to the doctor, to the pediatrician, like two or three days later, and you have to do it all again. It’s so scary. But then you get used to it. It took me a long time, though. For any new mamas who are scared to do, like, normal life things that you didn’t think about before, that was me. I didn’t drive in the car with her alone without my husband for three months. It took me a long time. Yeah. Or maybe it didn’t. I don’t know if that’s long or short. We… I was just like, “Nope, I’m too scared. Something bad’s gonna happen. We’re just gonna stay home.”
Jamie: Yeah. I get that. How was your recovery with your C-section?
Alisa: Not bad. My husband is a saint and very involved, and I think having a partner in this, whether it’s your romantic partner or a parent or a friend, is really important. It’s a major surgery. Ugh. And my doctor wanted me to stay, and she said stay in bed for five days, around the bed for five days, and then I don’t know what the last part of that was.
But I was tired of being cooped up in my room, so I would be… She’d come from our appointments, and I would just be watching movies in the living room. And she’d say excuse me, you’re supposed to be in bed.” And I was like, “I’m just on the couch. It’s gonna be okay.” But I limited my movement.
Of course, I couldn’t lift anything for six weeks. But I didn’t have any complications. My scar is amazing. It healed beautifully. I just, I think I had a great doctor and a really good experience and great support in my recovery. I really took my time with the recovery and rested a lot. It wasn’t bad. It really wasn’t bad.
Jamie: And mentally, how were you?
Alisa: Tired and pretty anxious. I think I keep coming back to the postpartum anxiety quite a bit. And this is a positive thing when you look at Instagram and Reels and things. You can find other people that have similar experiences, which helps you, normalize things for you.
I was afraid to carry the baby around the house ’cause I was convinced I was gonna drop her everywhere. It was just in my mind, I just kept seeing it over and o- I’m gonna drop her on the cement, I’m gonna drop her on the tile floor. It’s going to happen. And I told my doctor this, and she said, “Okay, let’s look around the house.
Do you have any tripping hazards? Any rugs you want me to pull up for you and put them away for a while?” I was like, “No, I’m just, I’m scared.” Or I would be cooking and I’m like, “Oh, the baby’s gonna fall into the oven. How is that gonna happen? I don’t know, but it’s gonna happen.”
Jamie: Yeah.
Alisa: So I think the anxiety, it’s dissipated quite a bit. It still pops up every now and then. Yeah. But but that was probably the hardest part.
Jamie: Yeah. I envisioned whenever we were outside at night that there would be a bobcat jump over the fence and get us. Oh.
Alisa: Yeah, isn’t that crazy? Yeah. It’s the brain, it goes into just overdrive.
Jamie: Yeah. Want to protect- Protection your little baby so much. Protection. Yeah. It’s wild.
Alisa: My doctor explained it to me hormonally. I think it was prolactin, she said, is the hormone that kicks into overdrive so that you protect your babies. And she said, “So if your gut is telling you that you don’t want your friend to hold your baby or your friend’s kid or whatever, don’t do it. It’s okay.” ‘Cause your cortisol level will go through the roof if you don’t listen to your body, and then, yeah. It’s just a whole system in place.
Jamie: Yeah. It’s wild how that works. How did you choose to feed your baby?
Alisa: In the hospital, they put her to my breast right when she was born, which I didn’t know that was the process. They were like, “Oh, she’s hungry.” I’m like, “She just came out of my body. How is she hungry?” And she latched right away, which was great.
I had a ton of pain breastfeeding. I’d like to normalize that. It’s painful. It’s very sensitive skin. And so in the hospital I asked for formula, and they shamed me for it. And I said, “I’m 47 years old. I’m not intimidated by you. I would like to feed my child, and I would like some formula.” And so when we got home, we had a lactation consultant come to the house.
I was using a pump that plugs into the wall, which I didn’t want to use, ’cause I didn’t want to be sitting plugged into a wall. So as soon as I got the wearable pumps, it was a game changer. But I have pretty low supply, so we’ve always used formula as well. We’re about half and half breast milk and formula.
If I’m having a lot of pain, I’ll pump and feed her with a bottle. If I don’t have a lot of supply, she gets formula. She goes back and forth bottle to breast all the time. In the hospital they said if you give her a bottle she’ll never breastfeed again, which is complete bullshit. Every baby’s different.
Jamie: Yeah, definitely.
Alisa: No, but I really enjoy breastfeeding her. I think it’s a, it’s been a great experience for us. And I didn’t even know I wanted to have it when I was pregnant, and I just love it so much.
Jamie: Yeah. What’s your plan for weaning?
Alisa: I don’t have one. I don’t have one. I’m trying to take things one day at a time as they come. I don’t know how we’re gonna end co-sleeping eventually. I don’t know how we’re gonna wean. I don’t know.
Jamie: Okay.
Alisa: I have no idea.
Jamie: For your recovery, you’re four months postpartum do you feel completely healed?
Alisa: I do. I don’t have any pain. I have some numbness around the scar still- which will probably be that way for, I don’t know, a while, maybe forever. I don’t know. But I feel good. I just started working out again, and it feels good to want to move and have energy to want to move my body. That feels really good. I’ve started doing yoga and… ‘Cause I’m nursing, so I’m bent over a lot, and I’m holding the baby like this, and so it with your neck sort of bent over. So it’s important to stretch your body out again.
So I do. I feel like I’m recovered from the pregnancy. I still have weight on my body from my pregnancy, which is fine. I’m breastfeeding, so you don’t wanna be focused on weight loss while you’re breastfeeding, or you could lose your milk supply.
We’re just relaxed over here, doing yoga sometimes and trying to eat well and eat enough is a big factor in having milk supply as well. So yeah.
Jamie: That’s awesome. Is there anything else you wanna mention about your birth?
Alisa: I’m grateful that I did not have a traumatic birth experience. I know it sounds long and arduous, but it was not traumatic. One beautiful thing I love to share is that every single person in the delivery room was female. Every doctor, every nurse, the anesthesiologist, everybody. So she was born into a room of really strong, smart, powerful women, and so I’m just carrying that with us on our journey.
Jamie: I love that.
Alisa: And we do have one more embryo, so we’re planning to do another pregnancy.
Jamie: Amazing. What is your plan for this next embryo, like time-wise?
Alisa: Yeah, so our doctor recommended 18 months, which I think is the standard maybe between C-section and embryo transfer.
So that puts us, what are we? February, March, April. April of next year. We might wait that long or we might go February or March, which is, same really. So that’s our plan is to do it as soon as possible because I’ll be 48 here very soon, and so we have a little bit of a clock ticking. So they’ll do the embryo transfer, before your age 50, so when you’re 49 is the last time you can do it.
Jamie: That’s awesome. Now, we have a handful of women in their 50s that have done IVF, so fear nothing.
Alisa: Love it. Yeah. I love it. And again, I feel good. I know a lot of my friends who are my age or older have little kids. My very best friend on the planet, her daughter is seven and she’s 57, so she adopted her at 50 as a newborn. And I just carry those things with me. Every time I thought I’m too old, I just look at my friend and her daughter who, and it’s such a beautiful life.
Jamie: Yeah. That’s great. What has been your biggest challenge being pregnant in your 40s?
Alisa: I think the opinions of other people people that, had babies young or didn’t struggle with infertility. I’m the only one in my family who has struggled with infertility, and I have a lot of women in my family, and they’ve all gotten pregnant really easily and young.
I think the relatability has been really tough. I’ve had to find community and people that, that get it, mainly online, and that was the whole purpose that I started an Instagram account focused on this, is because I felt alone. I just wanted to find one person my age who had done IVF at 46, 47, and there are hundreds of thousands. Who knew?
Jamie: Yeah. There really are. Is there anything you recommend to prepare someone for pregnancy and birth over 40?
Alisa: Find your people. You need the support. It’s a very specialized community, and it’s very supportive, but I don’t think it’s community that exists in the wild for most people. … It’s not your neighbors. It’s probably not your parents or your siblings. You have to find your people and stay there. Just stay in the bubble of positivity and support and have conversations with people who get it and who are on the same path.
Jamie: That’s perfect. What advice would you give yourself when you were pregnant, if you could go back?
Alisa: Oh. I think just to give myself a little more grace. I’ve been a business coach since 2010, and so I’ve always loved, helping my clients in sales and creating things for my own company and just going a mile a minute all the time, and I had to slow down in pregnancy, and I almost didn’t wanna slow down.
It’s a different version of you when you’re pregnant. It’s not the everyday you that you’re used to. So I think I probably should have given myself a little more grace and been a little more open with my husband with the emotional stuff that was piling up. I had a bunch of meltdowns thinking that I was losing my identity, that I didn’t have energy anymore, that I wouldn’t be able to have my company anymore, that life was ending.
Yeah. And it’s just pregnancy, so just giving yourself… I would have given myself some more grace.
Jamie: Yeah. Now, we have a lot of listeners who are trying to conceive over 40. What advice do you have for those women?
Alisa: Don’t give up. Don’t give up. I think there’s this stigma around having babies in your 40s, and for some reason we’re all taught that 35 is the end of fertility, and it isn’t.
Ask questions, advocate for yourself and don’t give up. It happens to many women. It happens naturally, it happens with interventions. It happens all the time. And a lot of women who do IVF end up getting pregnant naturally afterwards, which is amazing.
Jamie: Where can we connect with you online?
Alisa: Oh, yes. Instagram is the best way. I have conversations with people all day on Instagram, and my account is IVF_over, spelled out, and _45, the numbers. So IVFover45.
Jamie: Perfect. Alyssa, your story’s amazing. Thank you so much for sharing.
Alisa: Thank you. Thanks for having me.